


Dangerous Habits (Dangerous Girl)

by Dovey



Category: Naruto
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, BAMF Haruno Sakura, Body Horror, Gen, Haruno Sakura-centric, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, Multi, Self-Esteem Issues, Self-Harm, Self-Mutilation
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-02-19
Updated: 2018-11-21
Packaged: 2019-03-21 10:57:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 24
Words: 44,210
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13739421
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Dovey/pseuds/Dovey
Summary: After the disasterous mission in Wave, Sakura returns to Konoha with a new drive: she wants to truly earn her spot on Team 7, and be able to protect her teammates. Unfortunately, nobody else seems to be willing to support her new goal, so she resorts to teaching herself: she decides her team needs a medic, and since she doesn't have the connections or record to earn a place at the hospital, she practices on herself.AKA the fic where sakura gets to be as dumb and have as little regard for her personal wellbeing as every other Naruto character, & teaches herself how to heal by inflicting & then fixing her own injuries. This deals both with some major changes to the plotline given her new skills, and the overall team dynamic.





	1. Decisions & Dissections

**Author's Note:**

> Please pay attention to the warning tags. This fic is explictly about a character hurting herself, and while her intentions are different from most real-world instances of self harm, it's not TOTALLY seperate and it's still a description of self-mutilation. Stay safe and stay healthy, y'all. 
> 
> I tried to give Sakura the development she deserved in-series, while also letting her stay a dumb 12 year old girl with silly crushes and bad instincts, because there's nothing wrong with that and I wish Sakura fics where less ashamed of her origins.  
> No Beta for this chapter, would love to have one for the next few :)

 

 

 

Sakura haruno knew she wasn’t an ideal ninja. She wasn’t particularly strong, or fast. She didn’t have endless chakra reserves or a clan bloodline. But she _was_ smart, and stubborn, and she would work with what she had.

 So when she stumbled back into the village after their disastrous first C-rank mission, she’s entirely aware that she’s only alive because of dumb luck and protective, unusually skilled teammates. Just because she understands that, theoretically, doesn’t mean she appreciates it.

She’d dreamed of being a shinobi for years, since before she had friends or a clear understanding of what the job even entailed. She knew you could be strong, and could protect people, and if you got really good, others would admire you. If her crush eventually invaded that dream, it didn’t destroy it- she’d wanted to be pretty for Sasuke, but you can’t be pretty if you’re dead. You can’t be impressive as a corpse.

  And contrary to what she’d once believed, having the boy you like save you doesn’t make you feel loved, just embarrassed. Worse, _Naruto_ saved her. The class clown who failed half the academy classes had done far more then she’d even tried to do during the mission. The absolute indignation of that- of being a ninja who couldn’t complete her own mission, hold her own, even just _survive_ on her own skills- it lived in the pit of her stomach and refused to let her claw it out. She tasted bile every time she had to look in the mirror and see the truth of it, there. She didn’t have a scratch on her, and it had nothing to do with her own abilities and everything to do with her teams’.

She doesn’t want to just survive. She wants to be strong enough to protect her teammates. She wants them to be able to rest with her on watch, for them to trust her with their lives and for her to be damned worthy of that trust. As it is, she wouldn’t blame them if they wouldn’t even let her help with the d-rank so-called missions that resulted in nothing but sore muscles and grass-stained clothes.

 

So she goes to find Kakashi-Sensei, and ask him to do what he should’ve done before, what she should’ve asked him to do before: teach her. Teach her how to defend, and to fight, and how to get strong enough to do those things well.

He rebuffs her instantly, and it stings worse than salt on a skinned knee.

He pats her head and says, “Maa, maybe later”, because Sakura has always been the soft, silly one of the group, regardless of Naruto’s class-clown status. He’s half sure this is an attempt to impress Sasuke, and half sure it’s an attempt to spend more time with Sasuke-who’s already taking up most of Kakashi’s lesson time- and entirely sure that Sakura will interest in applying herself to the task within the month.

So she leaves the training grounds, furious and feeling tears threatening to break free, and she slaps herself and forces herself to plan.

She’s not from a clan. She doesn’t even have any ninja relatives: she’s got no resources except the books deemed appropriate for no-clan genin available at the library, which aren’t many. So she thinks harder, because she’s clever and she’s angry and she’s very, _very_ resourceful _._ The library doesn’t offer more than half a dozen books on jutsus, and basic ones at that, but it’s filled with medical textbooks that offer no practical explanations but lots of detailed charts and historical accounts.

 Sakura knows she can’t be more powerful than the boys when it comes to chakra reserves or jutsu skills. But she’s smarter than both of them, better at learning from dusty books and deciphering the cryptic language of medical jargon, and she’s got a knot of self-hatred in her stomach that’s been growing every day that means she’s willing to do all sorts of things they aren’t.

 Most medic nin start training on animals, she knows that. Dead fish and then living fish and then mammals. Eventually, if they’re successful, they can start to assist in hospitals- even end up a field medic if they’re skilled and experienced enough. Perhaps she’d be okay with doing that, taking the long route and all it entailed, if she could find a spot on the hospital roster. But Sakura doesn’t have any recommendations, or connections, or favors to use. Besides, she doesn’t want to go slow: she wants to know, NOW. She wants to be better.

 The systems of animals are totally different from that of humans, and the very idea of trying to intentionally hurt animals- even if she intended to heal them- wasn’t something she could stomach. She did not want to take her time adjusting slowly to healing the human form, and the only creature she wanted to suffer in this effort was herself.

 She starts small. She trains, and then heals her own bruises and aches.

She fucks up, at first. Even with the textbooks, the detailed illustrations and complex accounts of exactly how muscles work and bend and skin is formed- she fucks up. She twists her own muscles into knots, severs veins and pushes her bloodflow too fast and then too slow. There is a part of her that wants to stop, the animalistic part that doesn’t give a shit about chakras and nindos and only knows she is making herself weak and this is not  a world that is kind to weak creatures. She preserves.

 But she doesn’t have a backup plan if this goes wrong: she is alone, in the woods, far away from any guidance or saviors. She has always been good under pressure, and she learns to fix her mistakes. It takes days to get over her self-inflicted limp, but she can heal twisted muscles and stop muscle fatigue and make it like her bruises had never been born.

 She spends days meditating, ticking through her body with a fine-tooth comb of a sensor, keeping her newly memorized lists in mind: organs, bones, nerve cells. She knows what’s there and she slowly learns to own them, manipulate them piece by miniscule cellular piece until she can fix them; Until her first mistakes are so intricately inspected and improved that it’s almost as if they never happened.

So what if she shows up slow and tired and sore to her official training? If her teammates notice, she’s sure they’ll chalk up her winded nature to the training. She can’t keep up because she never could keep up, and if she’s slower now than before it’s not like anyone was paying attention to her progress in the first place.

 She runs in dizzying laps far behind her teammates and dreams of the adrenaline rush that always accompanies her injuries, the satisfaction when she resolves them. The sense of accomplishment is the kind she remembers back in her academy days, when she aced her quizzes and it didn’t matter if she lost a spar because it wouldn’t kill her.

She grows sick of bruises and twisted muscles and turns her attention to the sorts of injuries that could actually do some damage, in the field. Cuts are surprisingly easier to heal than bruises, and while she starts small she moves much quicker to the nastier slashes that an enemy would deliver without hesitation.

She twists the knife when she must, because ninja are not always dealt clean slices. She draws the lines long and vicious when she must, and she takes pride in her tears because they are a sign of one of the many lessons she’s learned: don’t waste energy numbing nerve cells when you need to be healing.

She keeps some of her scars, as signs of lost- and won- battles with herself. The sort that can be explained as minor training accidents, which is technically what they are. Reminders of hard-earned truths that she cannot risk forgetting.

 She gets better in sparring, too, though it’s not a miraculous leap. She knows how to break a leg, for example, beyond just simple principle: she knows it intimately, the feel of snapped bone and punctured skin. She knows where exactly to grip the leg and where to break it for the worst fixes, the most painful drawn out recoveries. She rarely applies this knowledge to its full extent, partially because it is rare she gets close enough to inflict any damage on her opponents at all. She doesn’t let this sour her. It was never her intended focus, anyways. She could never hurt anyone else the way she hurts herself, besides, not so easily and repetitively.

Healing begins to become easier than breathing, and she turns her attention to the difficulties of shinobi life: gut wounds, tendon severing, missing limbs and ruptured organs and blindings and the nastiest of wounds.

She sets about it with the same practicality she had with her previous injuries, but in this, her instincts are not as easily queiled.

 It’s a dark night, clouds covering the moon and the stars and her timid, rushed escape from her house. She is deep in the woods within minutes, in the cover of ancient trees and newborn brush and she is terrified.

She has a kunei, freshly sharpened- barely dulled from her terrible practice in training, the only person this blade has managed to hurt is it’s owner- and she contemplates it with straining eyes.

 Part of her wants to turn back.  She can just as easily try to learn more about bones or complex scarring tonight- her new resolution is far beyond what she’d been tempted to try before. It’s no small thing, and the beast within her chest pounds its fists and she distantly knows that it’s her heart and that if she messes this up that beast will stop, she will stop, and she will not get back up again. She will not see her family, or make up with Ino, or marry Sasuke, or prove Kakashi-sensei wrong.

When they find her body they will assume it’s a suicide. The village will remember her as a coward, if they remember her at all- and why would they, when she’s nothing but a common genin?

This is what pushes her. She’d rather be dead than useless, and her teammates had not hesitated to do what was necessary on the battlefield. She just needed to remember that this was her fight, her battleground, and if she doesn’t do this- doesn’t master it- she won’t be able to do anything when she must.

She steels her hands because she knows, with a dazed sense of certainty, that a shaky slice will be hard to fix.

Perhaps she should start with a gut wound, or a severed tendon. Those things are far more painful but far less _instant-_ but she cannot back down now. She can’t be weak. _Not again._

She brings the blade clean across her throat and knows, suddenly, what regret tastes like.

The surge of adrenaline in her is ruthless and it turns all her instincts to muck. She cannot think, grasping at her throat to hold her blood in and struggling to breath and realizing that she can’t. She can’t. she is ragged and wild and dying, so very quickly, and then she comes to her senses because she has to or she will die.

She knits together the inside of her throat and can feel the skin heal over on top of it against her slack hands and she is filled, _brimming,_ with joy.

 She did not die. She was not weak. She cut her throat and sewed it back together and the blood on her hands is her own, and she finally feels powerful. All ninja know to fear the knife against their neck, and she has beaten hers.

As the elation subsides, she considers the reality of her situation: she cannot do this again. Her chakra reserves are nearly empty, and a test of her throat shows that she cannot talk. She doesn’t know enough yet, hasn’t fully absorbed the knowledge she needs to try this in a fight.

But she wants to. She misses it already, the electricity of it all. Hurting and healing are so tied in her mind and this was the biggest dose of it she’d given herself yet.

 She sets herself home, already planning her meals to increase her iron intake and considering what books she’ll need to find- maybe steal from the chuunin library- to get the knowledge she’ll need to be able to do this everyday, if she must. (If she wants to.)

 If Sakura had been seen in a hospital, or part of a chuunin team, they’d likely start to spot the signs by now: adrenaline junkies are common among ninja, after all, and pose a risk to most teams. But Sakura is alone in every sense of the word, and she only poses a risk to herself, and so her drive goes unchecked and unfettered.

\---

Sakura is almost certain there isn’t a part of her body  older than two months in creation. It is a heady, terrifying, powerful thought. She’s built herself, a mother to New Sakura, and can only hope this body has better instincts than her first.

 Of course, her team does not notice.

She is learning not to expect them too. They would die for her, that much is clear, but they do not seem to pay much attention to her beyond that, and she misses when that was a shock to her and not a fact.

 Besides, she is learning to hide her newfound strength. She knows it will bring questions, and she isn’t ready to give answers. Doesn’t know what she would say. She respects what she does- the bitter pain of taking knowledge from her own body, and suffering has scraped the self hatred out of her gut, but she senses something wrong with it, too. The sort of thing she’d get judged for, probably made to stop, but she’s getting stronger and she desperately doesn’t want it to stop, the suffering or that growth, so she hides it. 

 When Kakashi says he has signed them up for the chuunin exams, she’s momentarily terrified. How can their team be ready for this? The exams are brutal, deadly things, and they have only been around for a few months. They’re barely a team at all, and she doubts they will hold together without the threat of immediate death or the influence of their sensei.

 Still, a part of her thrills at it: a chance to prove she is useful! A chance to protect the others! She only hopes she will not grow to regret accepting the challenge.


	2. A big time whoopsie

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> in which i try to avoid rewriting the same exact chuunin exam arc and start to deliver on Sakura getting to apply herself in the field.

They’d been doing so well up until this point. Even Naruto had managed to keep relatively silent, and they’d followed Sasuke’s plan easily.

The arrival of those odd, overwhelming sound nin changed everything.

The woman who’d brought forth those giant snakes- and sakura shuddered at the thought of them, of the thought of Naruto facing them alone, but she can’t leave sasuke unguarded and she’d just have to trust her teammate could handle himself- seemed to be perfectly happy to monologue as she fought, tongue darting out to flick at the sky as she teased the barely conscious Sasuke with her vastly superior powers. It was like Sakura wasn’t even there. Numbly, Sakura thought, _at least that much is familiar._

She couldn’t just keep standing there, hovering in front of her teammate with a clearly useless kunai. She had to _do_ something, and with a half hearted start she jumped forward.

She tripped, sliding on the mossy ground, kunai lost in an effort to keep from stabbing herself on the fall down, and ended up at the woman’s feet. She found it in herself to blush, her whole body turning red, as if this as an academy training exercise and not a mistake that would likely cost her her life.

The woman looked down at her with something meaner than pity and chuckled. “Is this what the ucihaha blood has been reduced to? Such clumsy teammates!” She snorted, and her foot slammed down on sakura’s chest.

 _Make it work._ Sakura thought, desperately grasping on the leg and finding a bare patch of skin. If she was better at this she could’ve done it through fabric, from a distance, from- _oh,fuck it, now is not the time to plan my new training regime._ She found what she was looking for in the instant her hand scrabbled onto the leg, even as her ribs cracked from the pressure of the foot. She hadn’t figured those out yet, but it didn’t matter- she was used to the pain, at least, and focused her energies on her mission. What a foolish, overconfident creature this woman must be to let Sakura keep so long a grasp on her.

She found a vein and followed it.

The paths where longer than her own, but similar enough to work. She found her way up to the woman’s heart and told it, simply, to _STOP._

It did.

 The woman fell over, even as sasuke struggled to his feet to try and- oh, was he coming over to protect her? Sakura supposes it says something that she’s surprised he would try so hard to help her, as if she hadn’t just let her lungs get crushed for his sake. Maybe they were a team after all.

_Team. Focus, Sakura. Protect the team. The woman was stopped now, but perhaps she would-_

Sakura dragged herself over to the prone form of the vile woman and hastily grabs her wrist. No pulse. Still, just to be sure- she leaves her hand where it is, checking for the pulse switching to a search for a nerve ending. There, another trail, and this is much more complex and difficult and she follows it wrong a few times until she finally finds her way up to the brain. This was one beast she’d refused to tackle, because a mistake there was not so easily fixed, to put it lightly. But, she thought to herself with an amused sort of huff, it doesn’t matter if she makes a mistake this time. She pushes, and with a snap, small parts of the brain burst, ensuring this woman remains a corpse forever. There. She’s dead.

_She’s dead. I killed her. Oh._

Danger gone and body attempting a recovery- and she can’t fix everything, but she nudges the ribcages back in the place and prays that she has enough chakra to seal them back in place, and Sakura stands on wobbling feet to make her way to a bush, where she promptly vomits what remains of a protein bar and the acid in her stomach. _It’s different when the person I hurt isn’t me_ , a fact that she catalogues in her brain next to other useless facts that she probably should’ve realized sooner, and then shoves it aside.

Naruto seems to have handled the snakes- she really needs to stop underestimating him- and Sasuke needs medical attention.

She’s got a mission to follow through on, a test to pass, teammates to protect. _Focus, Sakura. Focus._

\--

“Orochimaru died….from a heart attack?” Genma asked, shock obvious in his stance if not in his tone. Anko spit on the corpse in front of them and nodded.

“Fuckin hard to believe, I know, but the medic nin’s been all over it. Kids who witnessed it say the same thing- Roach here was crushing some poor girls guts out, and then he was keeled over dead.”

“I….I guess his jutsu _would_ put a lot of strain on a body?”

“Yeah, sure, the excitement of an academy exam did him in.” Anko replies sarcastically. “I don’t know what the _real_ cause is, but I’m happy to see the bastard gone. Who knows what he was planning on doing here this time.”

\--

The individual matches had been assigned, and Sakura had barely rested in the meantime. Killing someone took half as much energy as healing her ribs, to her chagrin, but she didn’t have the reserves to do both so easily. Foolish. She’d have to work on that, too.

“Sakura Haruna VS Rock Lee” was staring down at her from the match board, slowly approaching in a creeping way that was hard to understand. Maybe she was glad she didn’t have to face a teammate, or a close friend, but she’d seen how the boy faired in a fight against that sand candidate and she know she didn’t have the taijutsu to match him by half- and that’s not taking into her account her bruised and recently-healed (By an actual medic, by now) ribs. Beyond that, she was realizing in matches like these, she would have the worse hand- she could heal herself endlessly, but what use was that in a spar? She could kill, maybe, but in a friendly fight she couldn’t distinguish between maiming and murder, and she wouldn’t risk the slightest chance of hurting a friendly nin. She had taught herself to survive, and entirely forgotten to prepare for good sportsmanship.

She’d lose this match quickly, that much was obvious, especially with how energized Lee seemed as he cheered on his teammates from across the balcony, fists pumping in the air and leaping in place. In comparison, Sakura could barely keep her eyes open. Resolutely, she turned herself to face Naruto and gestured for his arm.

“Sakura-chan!” He said, flustered, and she rolled her eyes.

“shut up, Naruto, I don’t mean it like that.” She corrected, and grabbed his hand with more force then she’d originally intend. Why did he have to make everything so embarrassing?

“You wore yourself out last test, idiot. I’m not sending you in the ring without at least checking up on your injuries a little.” Her hand glowed faintly green as she sent a pulse of chakra through him, searching for anything worse than a few bruises. She knew she should probably trust the exam’s medics, but part of her refused to take anything at face value that came from outside their team, especially in regards to Naruto’s safety. Experience had taught her very few people had his best interests in heart. (she checked his chakra reserves too, seeing as he must’ve used them quite heavily in his fight with the snakes. He’s fresh and full as ever, the bastard. _If only I had reserves like that_ , she thought wistfully.)

“Oh! Thanks, Sakura-chan, that’s awesome, you’re so nice!” Naruto gushed, inspecting her hands as if he would be able to find the source of the now-finished green glow. “Wait, isn’t your match up yet? You shouldn’t waste chakra like that!” He told her, trying to look stern with a finger flicking out like Iruka-sensei did when he lectured, and Sakura flustered under the attention.

She had forgotten so quickly why she cared about her idiotic teammate in the end- he looked up to her, noticed her, and seemed to even care about her. It was a nice reminder that she wasn’t the only one to care about all the members of team seven, and she ruffles his hair even as he braced for a slap on the back of his head.

“Ah, don’t worry about it, dobe.” She told him, and spared a slight glance at the more somber members of their team.

 Sasuke and Kakashi were focused on the match and their private conversation, luckily. She considered going over to check on Sasuke too, but- Naruto wouldn’t think it odd that she could do what she did, seeing as he seemed ready to accept anything and everything at face value. Those two would notice right away and start to ask questions she wasn’t comfortable answering _. Besides, it’s not like he’d trust me to do it right_ , the bitter thought almost distracting her from the announcement that her match was up next.

She walked down the stairs to ring, even as Lee sprung over the railing to land in a spray of sand at the base of it.

 “I, Rock Lee, eternal youth of Gai-Sensei’s training-“ the boy began, even as they reached to shake hands. If she was lucky he’d monologue so long she might get a shot in before her inevitable defeat.

“-concede to the beautiful spring blossom that is Sakura Haruno! I could never bring myself to harm my cherished bulb, and forfeit this match in the name of gai-sensei’s honorable teachings!” He bowed, eyes sparkling- how do they _do_ that- and sprung back up into the balcony ring to tenten’s screech and gai-sensei’s proud tears. Neji rolled his eyes, which was the most emotion Sakura had ever seen from the Hyuuga.

Hn. In normal circumstances, she’d demand he fight, call him down and feel indignant at the underestimation. Right now, she took it as the lucky break it was and wandered back up to the balcony. _Ninja shouldn’t look a gift horse in the mouth._ Especially Ninja with bruised ribs.

“Who knew you’d win a match from feminine wiles, billboard-brow! We’ll make a kunoichi out of you yet, eh?” Ino teased, and sakura spared her a worn-out smile.

“Guess so.” She said, and collapsed into her seat next to her teammates, prepared to nap right up until her teammates matches and possibly right through them. It had been a very, very long day.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> well that changes some things, huh?
> 
> I figured we were all a little sick of seeing the same Ino VS Sakura fight, and besides, part of this is trying to have Sakura in difficult situations and survive them without seeming too OP. (But I refuse to rehash the orichimaru plotline and I think the way I've written it is believable enough- and there's something satisfactory in having the villain obsessed with bloodlines and power getting killed by a clanless genin. And nope, Sakura is probably never gonna find out that she killed one of the legendary Saanin.) 
> 
> next chapter is the tournament, and Sakura gets put to a test that requires more brain than self-inflicted misery. Any guesses to her opponent?


	3. End of the Exams

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sakura hates sand- It's course and rough and irritating and it gets everywhere.

Her luck couldn’t hold.

 

  Her very first official match is again Gaara, the terrifying sand nin that had managed to defeat lee. The sweat dripping down her brow wasn’t from the heat- she couldn’t let this match come down to power, or she’d lose without a doubt. She’d have to be clever about this.

  She pays closer attention to the ring itself than the spars going on in them as her match draws closer and closer. She wishes she had the time to root for her friends and fellow Leaf nin, but she’s a little too desperate to survive her upcoming match to risk the distraction.

Observing Shikamaru’s match is something of a calming inspiration- she’s never seen the Nara in his element before, and his ability to defeat the vastly more powerful- both physically and in terms of chakra- Temari is a welcome sight, even if he concedes in the end. (It would be more reassuring if she did not know that the girl appeared terrified of Gaara, despite hailing from the save village.)  He’d likely be fighting Sasuke in his next match, and had already used up his chakra- even his defeat is strategized, and Sakura can’t help but admire him for it. _I should beg him for some lessons later._ Ruefully, she shakes her head to clear it of the distraction. She can’t help but want to learn more, even with such a pressing fight approaching. Perhaps if she’d had a little more foresight and had strategy lessons before her upcoming deathmatch, she wouldn’t have to refer to it as a _deathmatch_ in her head.

 It doesn’t matter, though. Survival instinct or no, she has to get through her round. There’s no way Sasuke and Naruto are going to lose their matches, so she can’t either. Their team needs to stay together, which makes things simple: she needs to win. She needs to beat Gaara of the San. _No pressure._

 This time she’s rested and has enough determination to fling herself down into the ring. If she’d taken the stairs, she might’ve turned tail and run instead- and besides, from the look of things, her opponent was impatient to get this over with. Something told her making him wait was a bad idea.

 

 Surveying the field while watching the previous matches had given her little hope. The earth was hard and bare, the walls towering over them, with a few trees scattered throughout the ring. There wasn’t much distance between the two of them. The only thing she saw worth considering was the small crater left from Temari and Shikamaru’s match, would could make for a passable cover. There was another flaw in her training: she needs to know enough jutsus for at least a reasonable defense, and a small sour part of her is cursing Kakashi for not considering this might happen. (Then again, given his expression when she got in the ring, it’s likely he thought she was going to forfeit before the match could even begin.)

The match starts all too soon for her tastes, and Gaara is barely looking when he sends a blast of sand in her direction. Thinking quickly, she dived and rolled into the crater she’d spotted, a brush of sand going over the top of her and rubbing her skin raw. She leaves it be, no reason to waste chakra now on what’s likely to be the most minor of her injuries.

“Tch.” Gaara mutters, crossing his arms in annoyance. She knows she doesn’t look like much of an opponent right now, cowering in a ditch, but she doesn’t need to look intimidating to beat him- the woman in the forest of death had taught her that.

  _Think, Sakura. What did we learn from his fight with Lee?_  

Another burst of sand comes at her, and this time she moves too slow getting out of the crater to avoid a deeper burn along her arm. _Nastiest case of rugburn I’ve ever had,_ flashes through her mind and she cracks a small grin at it, hoping that the boy doesn’t notice and decide to take her as a more serious opponent. It’s a nasty, painful thing, considering bits of sand stick into the wound and burn like salt inside of the roughed raw red skin, but she turns her focus onto what she knows about the boy besides how damn scary he looks right now.

His match with Lee had proven he was skilled in jutsu and distance attacks. He was probably crap at taijutsu, but Sakura wasn’t exactly a prodigy at it herself, and wasn’t going to kid herself that she’d be able to get close enough to even attempt it.

She rolled, sliding, and threw out a single smoke bomb to allow her a few more moments to think, allowing herself to dodge instinctively and focus on the problem. Could she destroy his main weapon? He used the sand instinctively, and-

She dodged too slow yet again, and this time it roughed up her flesh enough to truly bleed. She refused to let out a noise of pain so he couldn’t locate her, but damn did it hurt.

_Ah! That’s it._

In the entire fight, lee had only managed to land a single hit on him, but it hadn’t affected the boy at all. Not because the sand nin was sturdy, or used to taking punches. He had a layer of sand protecting him. _Protecting him from everything._ If this sand was truly instinctive like it seemed, this wasn’t likely to stop outside his fights.

If she was right, her opponent had never had so much as a papercut. _His weakness might just be my speciality_! She thought with a delighted crow, and set her hands nervously into the unfamiliar shape to call forth a basic genjutsu.

She wasn’t gifted at genjutsu, far from it, but she’d learned well enough to pass the academy classes; and if her theory was right, it wouldn’t matter if Gaara knew the illusion was fake, he still wouldn’t be able to throw it off. What would a boy who’s never bled do if he suddenly felt the pain of a thousand or so self-inflicted injuries?

 _Hopefully, forfeit._ She thought, and then set herself to work.

“Shadow-Boar Genjutsu!” Sakura yelled, finishing the seal. The smoke from her bomb had finally dissipated and the audience let out an angry murmur- this match was taking too long as it was, and now the girl delaying things was attempting a jutsu she couldn’t even use silently?

And then the audience paused, because Gaara wasn’t attacking. It felt like the breeze itself had stopped for a second, but Sakura couldn’t allow herself to get distracted by her small victory.

 The boy was frozen, shuddering, starring at his hands for a moment. Was this obvious genjutsu really tricking such a powerful-seeming nin?

“K-Kai!” He called out, but he couldn’t move his hands into the proper dispelling seal and he couldn’t truly focus his attention away from his hands. Still, he wasn’t about to forfeit. She’d have to make things worse.

Carefully, she walked closer to ease the strain on her range. She’d started by drawing on the pain she felt from her bleeding sand-burns, figuring she should start with the easiest thing to draw on. Now that she had the form figured out, she began to dig through her memories for something familiar. Ah, there-

She drew out the memories of breaking her own leg. The brutal snap, everything flaring, the time her bone broke through her skin and blood poured everywhere and she couldn’t stop crying-

Gaara collapsed to the ground, shrieking, grasping at his leg. Still, he didn’t forfeit. He was certainly dedicated, she had to give him that. His sand wavered around him as if confused, trying to find the source of his pain.

She considered her most familiar memories, the wounds she knew would be most common to fix in the battlefield and thus the most important to practice over and over again. Nothing stuck out as particularly powerful, but she drew on the memories of failed fixes and layered them on top of the feeling of getting her ribs cracked and chest pressed into the unforgiving ground as she had desperately tried to breath-

His hands leapt from his leg to his stomach, a horrible wheeze falling out of his throat. “Make it stop, make it stop!” He wailed, tears streaming down his sand-masked face. Sakura glanced up desperately towards the proctor, hoping that would be enough. The boy had seemed cruel, certainly dangerous, but she didn’t like causing this sort of pain for a test. The referee nodded in agreement, announcing,

“Winner: Sakura Haruna of the leaf village!”

Sakura released the jutsu quickly, hoping to relieve the boy as soon as possible, only to find herself getting blasted into the wall by a wave of sand. Her so recently healed ribs are re-cracked, her skin is burning, and she’s lucky most of the sand is below her face or she’d be blinded and unable to breath.

Glancing up through the haze of rushing sand and pain, she could see Sasuke and Naruto already running down the steps quickly, presumably planning to jump into the ring and interfere. Oh, she did love her boys sometimes.

Before they could arrive, however, the sand had stopped and she wilted towards the ground, back pressed against the wall and legs sprawled bloody before her. Gaara had stumbled back, clutching his head and forcing his sand back into the container on his back.

 Well, she was right about it being instinctive sand, after all. Maybe it wasn’t his call when it acted defensively like that.

 There’s a long moment of silence in the stadium, every shinobi worth their salt tensing in their seats. Sakura might not be particularly important to the village, but an underhanded move like that after her match means she probably, technically, has the right to call for some sort of revenge. Against the boy, maybe his village, she’s not totally sure. She hates clan drama.

She waves her less-sore arm towards the proctor and calls out, hoarse, “Can I get a medic already?”

 It’s enough to set the world back into motion again, a team with a stretcher bursting forward to collect her and she lets herself blissfully pass out as soon as she’s lifted onto the thing.

 When she wakes up, her skin is new and ribs are fixed- again- and she’s even been rehydrated from all the crying. She doesn’t feel _great,_ but she had a feeling she would’ve been left to sleep it off for a few days if she didn’t have an obligation.

She turned her head to groggily ask the nurse, “How’d m’ teamma-es do?”

Thankifully, the nurse gets the gist of it- likely because he’s used to codependant Konoha- and reassures her, “They both won their matches. Both came to visit you when you were out, but then blonde one’s match came up and they had to go.”

What a relief.

“Who’m I gonna fight?”

Because, technically, she had won her match.

“As your medical support right now, I gotta tell you, that’s a really bad idea.” He warns her, but she forces herself to give a very painful shrug. He snorts, then tugs her out of the bed. “Guessed you’d say that. Genin are always trying too hard. Good luck, then, ‘cause you’re facing your Uchiha teammate, and your match is up next if you’re really going through with this.”

Great. She was almost out of chakra, could barely move, and she had to fight _Sasuke._

This was a losing battle to go into, but she had to give it a shot.

\--

She does, in fact, lose.

She had staggered into the ring and Sasuke had rolled his eyes and demanded she forfeit and go back to the medic center. Naruto was cheering something like _Kick his ass, Sakura!_ And she belatedly decided that Naruto was her new favorite, even if it heated up her face to think Sasuke was worried about her well being and maybe even didn’t want to fight her. Sasuke wanted to fight _everyone._

The proctor is giving her the same look the nurse gave her, but still signals the start of the match.

She does not get a hit in. He helps support her standing up when he puts the Kunei to her throat and demands she forfeits- which she does- and helps her walk back out of the arena to collapse into the nurse’s bed.

 _Sasuke can be surprisingly nice sometimes_ is her last thought before she falls back asleep.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I actually picked Gaara because he's the only one I had a clear idea for how she could beat despite her current skillset. It seems like the chuunin exam is always a wakeup call for Sakura, and in this case, it's a wakeup call that healing abilities are good for the team but she needs to build herself up as an individual player.   
>  (if you're wondering, Sasuke ends up winning the tournament because without Gaara in the running he doesn't have any other Uber Powerful opponents to fight and Kakashi was still training him for his presumed-inevitable match with Gaara, and Naruto ends up losing his second match to tenten because she's super cool and he has no idea what her skillset is to give him a clue how to fight her. you go, tenten!) 
> 
> thank you so much for the comments! I was really nervous about my premise and hearing your kind words has been a big motivator to keep writing !!! :)


	4. Ramen and Revelations

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Team dinner & proof that someone is paying attention... kind of.

They go out to eat as a team after the tournament, and Sakura is excited to realize that a few of the nin around them seem to recognize her as much as they recognize her teammates. Not nearly as many- she may have won her match, but in a basic and unimpressive way, certainly nothing astounding to be on par with Naruto’s infamous pranks or Sasuke’s family name- but it’s something, and helps her make the journey to the restaurant slightly less painful. (her muscles are heaving and her eyes are drifting, but it’s the nice kind of tired that comes from a good day’s work, and just makes the whole experience feel more like a dream.)

“What’d you even do to him, anyways?” Naruto asks, peering over at his ecstatic (if exhausted) teammate. She gives him a smile and dug into her rice some more, pausing to chew before replying,

“I used genjutsu on him. I’m not very good but I had passed all the academy tests on basic mental projections.”

“Pft.” Sasuke snorted, even if he did knock shoulders with her at the same time. “And here we thought he was going to be a real challenge. If he can’t get past some beginner illusions he must not be as impressive as he acts.”

Sakura ignored the slight to her achievements with rather good grace. After all, she’s the one who had _thought_ to use genjutsu on the boy, and she doubted either of her teammates could’ve come up with a convincing enough illusion without her experience.

 _What an unusual feeling._ Sakura though, reaching to grab a platter of fish for herself away from Naruto. _Pride is actually rather nice._ She didn’t have to kill anyone or look to someone else for approval- for once, she was satisfied with herself on her own terms.

 Kakashi was rather quiet, despite the fact that he had kept his book in his shirt pocket for most of the dinner. He’d even promised to pay for their meals since all of his students had won their initial matches, though his genin had doubts he wouldn’t disappear before the bill arrived.

“Hm. What did you show him, Sakura?” He asked, seemingly genuinely curious. She shied under his gaze, trying to focus on the food in front of her. She had wanted his attention for so long but felt stifled beneath it now that she had it, and she could only hope she wouldn’t slip up under the weight of it.

“Oh, you know, just- injuries, from training and stuff. I noticed he didn’t seem used to pain because his sand barrier was so good, so he wouldn’t have much tolerance for it?” She finished it as a question, and lit up like a match when Kakashi patted her on the head.

“clever thinking.” He told her, and she remembered that outside approval was pretty nice, too. No wonder Naruto was so devoted to earning the village’s love, if it felt anything like this.

It was still a relief when he pulled out his book and turned his attention away from the group. He wasn’t going to pry any further, apparently, and what a relief that was for Sakura- even if a part of her clenches at the reminder that she is not nearly as interesting or worth prying into as Sasuke.

 He even stayed to pay for their food afterall! It really was a good day for Sakura, all things considered. At the end of the meal, Sasuke gestured towards her offhandedly.

“I need to talk to you.” He says, and she tries to calm her feverently rushing nerves.

  _Stupid, he’s not about to ask you out. It’s probably a question about training._ Still, she couldn’t hide her faint blush and stammer as she answered, “Of course, Sasuke-kun!”

Kakashi left the diner with a fond exasperated look, dragging a cursing Naruto with him. (“Wait, Sakura-chan, don’t just go with that asshole!” was heard desperately in the distance, but she shrugged it off. Naruto might be her favorite teammate, but he isn’t _cute,_ and there’s no way she’d date him. _Ick!)_

 They walked slowly towards the Uchiha compound and Sakura waits for Sasuke to speak first. It was hard to calm her nerves (unlike calming her nerve-endings, and for a moment she desperately wishes messing with her brain chemistry was as simple as messing with her body. _Stupid, don’t even consider it.)_

“How’d you kill that woman?” Sasuke asks, refusing to look directly at her.

Ah. So it was about that. At least he wasn’t intending to insult her- and it meant someone had been paying attention to her, afterall.

“Oh, I- I didn’t do anything! You saw, she just sort of- you know, collapsed. I was just very lucky, Sasuke-kun.” She said, reaching to reassure him and then quickly drawing her hands away.

“Tch. We both know that’s not likely. What’d you do?”

 He was pressing hard but still refused to look at her. She’d just have to gamble he’d keep it a secret- he wasn’t like Naruto, and besides, who could he tell besides Kakashi? And would Kakashi even believe him if he did? Given how many people had accepted Sakura’s run-ins at face value, she doubted it.

“You- you can’t tell anyone.”

This makes him look at her, finally, consideringly. He gives her a slow nod and she can see a hint of surprise that she’s seemingly taking something as serious as he takes everything in his life. _He probably ties his shoes seriously._ The thought came unbidden, distracting, and she forced down a snort. Really not the time for that.

They’d reached the compound, and with it, certainly more than enough wards against eavesdropping to keep this exchange safe if anyone bothered to listen in on two genins- as if there was anyone around in the tragic compound, anyways.

 She couldn’t just tell him, that much was obvious. It wasn’t the sort of thing people believed about her, apparently, or she knew she wouldn’t have gotten away with it for this long. She’d have to prove it- or at least prove her abilities.  As they pasted into his house, door clicking behind them, she had an idea for how to do it: a safe way to do it, that won’t even tell him what she’s been doing. Something tells her that even Sasuke might rat her out if he knew the full extent of it.

 

“Give me your hand.” She says, even as she turns bright red at saying it, and sasuke rolls his eyes but acquiesces. She forgot how often her teammates would indulge her, and even if it’s pitiable, she’ll take it. It’s as close to friendship as she’s had since her early days with Ino. 

“you know how chakra flows, right?” She asks him, but doesn’t wait for an answer as she continues, “And blood goes in pathways?”

He nods, and allows her to rotate his arm so that it’s fully stretched out.

“well, I’m not- I’m not going to mess with that, for you, because that’s dangerous and dumb and you won’t really feel it.” She stammers her way through, but begins to trace a line on his arm as professionally as she can. Luckily, he seems to take it as much, and they both pretend they don’t see his ear tips turn red. _Cute._ She thinks, but doesn’t let it show, because this is important and risky and _new._ He’s trusting her.

“They don’t mention it in class much because you can’t use it the way you can use arteries, but we’ve got nerve pathways too, which is how we feel stuff. And they lead up to the brain, just like the blood veins lead up to the heart. So-“

And then she sends a very tiny surge of chakra down his arm, and finds a spot on his upper arm that makes sense. _There_. She pokes it, and can see his eyes widen when he doesn’t feel the nudge. He’s smart enough to understand what this implies.

“I can follow the pathways and stop them- or start them!” She reassures, quickly sending another small pulse to release her deadening of the endings.

“So what’d you do to that nin?” He asked, and it was Sakura who released his hand. He seemed a little too shocked to do it himself, and now wasn’t the time for her to be- mooning over him, as it were. _Plus, he might not want that contact once he knows…_

“I stopped her heart.”

There was a pause, insufferably long to her, before he tilted his head to really look at her. Now it was Sakura’s turn to avoid eye contact.

“I’ve been studying so I can heal us, reading lots of medical textbooks…. I didn’t even consider it could be dangerous until I had the idea to use it on her. Please, you can’t mention this to anyone, I don’t-“ and she huffed, trying to figure out how to explain this without adding that she doesn’t want to stop hurting herself along the way. Best to go with the remaining truth of it: 

“I don’t want to have to practice stopping my friend’s hearts.”

_I got more than enough of a taste of hurting strangers, today. Don’t make me hurt my friends too._

“Fine.” Sasuke says, and hesitantly pats her on the shoulder. “I won’t.”

She can tell what he’s probably seeing right now: the civilian girl, not ready for the kind of brutality clan kids are raised in. That’s fine, and it’s not entirely wrong: she’s figured out by now she doesn’t mind pity from the rest of her team so long as she can still help them.

This gives her an idea.

“Do you think….” She starts and then pauses, trying to read his expression. He’s never been very clear in his emotions, but she’d gotten good at reading him, and decides it’s worth the risk. She needs to trust her teammates a little more. “Do you think you and Naruto could teach me some of your jutsu? I want to be able to defend myself and Kakashi-sensei….is, um, taking the lessons too slow.”

_Hopefully, he’ll do it just so he has to waste less time trying to protect me on missions._

To her surprise, he gives her a small smile when he nods in agreement. “You could use the help.” Is what he says, but she’s not going to try and argue with the truth if it means he’s going to help. 

She’ll just have to ask Naruto tomorrow, and figure out how to change her schedule so that she has time for their D-missions and training with the boys and her hurting-healing practices….and the big chunk of her day where Kakashi trains Sasuke and leaves her to basic target practice.

 Sakura is learning she doesn’t mind being busy, after all. Especially when it means she’s catching up.  

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I promise this fic is gen (Sakura has WAY too much going on mentally/emotionally, y'all) but Sakura is allowed to keep her silly crush on her teammate and Sasuke is allowed to be 12 and still sorta-believe in cooties. 
> 
> Up next: cute team 7 interactions, and sakura learning something that has major consequences.


	5. Well, Shit.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Team 7 gets to be cute, and sakura learns something that has major consequences.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm pretty proud of the playlist I made for this fanfic, so here's one of the most upbeat songs from it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RMa4yXBZGnU

Sakura meets up with her teammates at their usual training center, a little earlier than usual. She’s come prepared, with sharpened kunai and senbon and her most practical clothes. She’s even sweeped her hair back into a bun: she desperately, desperately wants this to go well.

Sasuke shows up soon after, dragging an scandalized Naruto behind him by the ear.

“Oye, bastard, what are you doing? Sensei won’t show up for hours and we’re gonna be early- Sakura!”

Naruto’s determined attempts to tug free coming to a flailing stop and the boy lights up. “Hey, Sakura-chan, what are you doin’ here early?” He asks, and Sasuke lets go of his ear long enough to give him a wallop on the head.

“she wants us to train her, dummy.” Sasuke says, and Sakura tries to hide a smile at the fact he used the word _us._ “I _tried_ to tell you on the way over.”

She had a feeling that they were growing on their most reserved teammate. Considering how quickly Naruto had wormed his way into her affections, she can’t blame the boy for the terrible lapse in judgement when it comes to picking his friends. _We’ll just have to work extra hard to make sure Sasuke-kun doesn’t come to regret it!_

 She resists the urge to bow to her teammates for half a second and then gives in, mostly for the comedic reaction she hopes to get. She’s not disappointed: Naruto stumbles back and quickly rights himself sheepishly, while Sasuke has a small look of pleased surprise.

“I’ve been looking forward to the lesson today!” She informs them.

“Hn. I think Naruto should go first, since mine will use a lot of chakra.” Sasuke says, and Naruto nods vigerously.

“Sure, sure! Just, uhh, give me some time to think about what I can teach ya’!”

Naruto sits himself down and scrunches up his nose and tilts his head back to stare at some clouds, apparently in deep thought. _I guess there’s a first for everything,_ Sakura thinks, and tries very hard not to laugh.

 It draws out for a few seconds, before Sakura decides to prompt, “You used to pull a lot of pranks in the Academy Naruto- do you think you could teach me something about traps?”

Naruto sprung off the ground and punched his fist in the air. “Ah, traps! Yeah, of course Sakura-chan! I’m really good at traps.”

The lesson begins closer to the woods, and the excitable begins by pointing out everything in the area that could be used to build traps. Then, he asks Sakura to point everything in the space that she thinks could be used to hide traps.

She only gets about a third of the number he can, but he reassures her it’s not a bad start. They spend the next hour and a half setting up the most basic traps out of what’s on hand and the surpisingly immense number of trap-making supplies Naruto keeps stashed in his pockets. Something tells Sakura his pranking is less limited to his academy days than she was lead to believe.

Twenty minutes into the trap making, Sasuke had joined in, and proved to be much better at widdling the natural aspects into the necessary shapes but terrible at actually assembling the traps themselves. Seperately, it takes them twenty minutes to build a working one: together, it’s closer to fifteen. Naruto makes twice as complicated a trap in the meantime, and it only takes him ten minutes.

  _The teachers were pretty dumb to say he didn’t have any skills. He should be on a scout & defense team, no doubt! _She tells him as much, and gets the pleasure of seeing her teammate turn bright red _and_ hop in a delighted circle for a few minutes.

When they have checked the time and Naruto has inspected their traps, they unanimously agree they’re ready for Sasuke’s lesson. He seems to pride himself on the position and fixes his posture as he prepares to demonstrate the Jutsu he’s promised them.

 It’s fire based, and when Sakura sees it, her heart nearly stops. It’s an Uchiha Jutsu, the type passed down from parents to children behind compound gates, and while it’s not particularly impressive and certainly not the most important jutsu in the Uchiha arsenal, it’s not intended for outsiders.

Naruto does not recognize the significance of this, but Sakura does, and it takes all her focus to not say something about it. If Sasuke-kun wanted them to make a big deal out of it, he’d have said something.

So instead she tries very hard to duplicate the hand gestures and not stand too close to Naruto’s sloppier attempts.

 Sakura is the first one to figure it out, after Sasuke demonstrates the transition of the last two handsigns a second time, and she’s delighted at the pitiful ghost of a flame that sparks out. She’d devote more attempts to it, but they technically still have their actual training to worry about, and her chakra reserves are low enough as it is from the first few goes at it that she can’t risk bottoming out. Still, she gets Sasuke to agree to supervise her trying it again after training if she’s got the chakra for it, and the back of her neck barely heats up at the idea of getting to spend more time with the boy.

Naruto takes a little longer to get it right, but when he finally gets the hand positions right, he gives it too much chakra and sends out a wild burst of flames that nearly catch a nearby tree on fire.

“Idiot!” Sakura yells, partially out of sheer terror, and Sasuke looks momentarily furious.

“Didn’t I warn you to build up your chakra later?” He demands, and Naruto looks away, embarrassed.

“sorry, guys, I guess didn’t realize how much energy I was putting in…” He muttered, lifting his hands in penance.

The movement allows Sakura to see that his hands have gotten lightly burned from the jutsu, and she has two thoughts enter her head at the same time: the first is that she should try and heal him. The second is that she should start applying her hurt-heal practices to burns as soon as she could. She prioritizes the first thought and dashes over to grab his hands, pulling them up for inspection.

Naruto seems to remember the once-over she’d given him during the Chuunin exams because he doesn’t put up a fight. She finds the issue easily enough- it’s a surface burn, the type she’s gotten from touching a hot pan too soon, and it’ll fade within days. (Actually, given Naruto’s history, she wouldn’t be surprised if it had faded in hours.)

Still, this moment of inspection is enough to give her pause. She had found the injury easily, inspected his pathways just in case- all of this came easily enough.

But she can’t fix it.

It’s not that she tried and failed- it’s that she can’t even try. His chakra is _wrong._ She could probably mess with his nerves, his veins, maybe a bit of the outer skin. But the parts of him that aren’t constantly reforming? His organs, his bones, his muscles- they’re infused with his chakra, and even just this scan of those deeper parts are a struggle.

A terrifying thought emerges, and she rips her hands away and dashes over to Sasuke to grab his wrists and attempt the same thing. She ignores the surprised boys and _digs,_ and is horrified to find the same thing here. Slightly weaker, maybe, not nearly so intense- but the revulsion is there. Her instincts are demanding she draw her chakra back, and it is startling how hard that instinct is to resist.

She has ruined herself.

 In her desperation to train herself, she has ground herself down to a honed skill at fixing her own body, and now her skill will not let her interfere with the things most important for saving someone.

It wasn’t like this when she had touched the monster in the chuunin exam’s brain- but that had been so hurt-heal practice sessions back, so many hours of devoted singular attention back, it’s entirely possible the compulsion was only just beginning to form.

She dimly realizes her teammates are asking her what she’s doing, and she quickly pulls herself together.

“I- I just had to make sure you didn’t hurt Sasuke-kun with that fireball, Naruto!” She said, flinging herself away from the both of them and letting out a nervous laugh. “Lucky for you, you’re both fine, so don’t worry about it.”

The boys look at each other, but choose to say nothing, and for that she is intensely grateful.

It is hours later, after training with Kakashi occurs- uneventfully, to say the least- and she manages to get the Fire jutsu down right under Sasuke’s watchful eye, that she allows herself to panic.

Momentarily, at least, because she quickly comes to a resolution.

There is no undoing what she has done. Not without telling someone, a professional medic, what she has been doing, and hoping they can tell her how to fix it, and she cannot risk that.

Months ago, this would’ve been cause for despair. Her whole purpose was to protect her teammates, become their equal, and she thought she’d found that role as the team medic. Experience was telling her otherwise, now that she was actually focusing on her teammates as a individuals. Naruto had an astounding healing rate, and Sasuke didn’t seem to be bound by pain in a fight. She’d looked at it so practically if her team had been normal, but she’d forgotten that prodigy ninja don’t need- or want- to be healed.

 She wasn’t going to try and carve herself to fit the team dynamic and do less than her best, give up her months of progress. She’d just have to figure out a new way to be strong, to protect her family. If she can’t fix them, she’ll just have to make sure they don’t get hurt in the first place. _Or,_ _really, hurt too badly. I have to at least try to be reasonable about this, and those idiots are always going to be getting themselves in trouble._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> please don't hate me! I promise there's going to be more exploration of her abilities, but I felt like making her capable of essentially reversing anyone's death was way too strong. Now she REALLY has to work on her other skills- and figure out how to weaponize what she's been doing, too. (Her bad habit isn't going to stop, in the meantime- I wasn't kidding when I said she was getting addicted to it.)
> 
> Up next: Sakura makes a decision, tries to increase her collection of new teachers, then makes a worse decision. Meanwhile, her worst sensei starts to get a lot more suspicious.


	6. Girls and gashes

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sakura makes a decision, adds to her collection of teachers, then makes a worse decision. 
> 
> Meanwhile, her oldest sensei starts to get a lot more suspicious.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> *theres a brief reference to the possibility of sexual abuse towards the end. it's not graphic and its made out of concern, not as a punchline or anything like that.

 

She breaks her fingers as she considers her options, a habit she’d picked up by accident after cracking her knuckles too far. It was good practice for pain tolerance, and dexterous fingers where essential to most ninja- and she had been assuming, when she’d started the practice,  that she would be needing to heal her teammates quite often.

Ninjutsu was clearly out of the question. She could meditate for lifetimes and never hope to match Naruto’s reserves, and Sasuke’s Sharingan meant he could learn a thousand forms in the time it took her to master one.

 Genjutsu was more promising, but she had two team members who specialized in escaping those very tricks. Not to mention the evolved form of the Sharingan could more successfully enrapture any opponent then a fantasy she could develop short-hand- and she doubted Sasuke would allow his to remain unevolved forever.

 Taijutsu…. was perhaps the most unexpected route to take, but hadn’t it worked for Rock Lee? He’d been put on a team with a clan heir, too, and managed to become his equal through sheer force of will. Her teammates might one day run out of chakra, or face an opponent with abilities that dismantled their jutsu, and then who would carry the team? Exhaustion was a ninja’s greatest enemy, in the end.

_Certainly my greatest enemy, up to this point._

She didn’t come close to the endurance of her teammates as it was. Taijutsu was probably her weakest link, all things considered, and the mere thought of the miles she’d have to run, the strength training she’d have to take up, was enough to make her blanche. But what was the point in getting strong at what was _easy?_ She was Sakura Haruno, third member of team seven, and she wanted to be powerful: and no power worth earning came easily. If she could break her own bones, she could learn to run a mile.

 Besides, the applications of her skills…. which she truly needed to name, now that they no longer fell under the classification of medical jutsu- to her taijutsu could prove fascinating and singular. There were other clan bloodlines in the world, other experienced jounin with bingo book ratings, even a scattering of other deep-chakra reserves. But she’s been crafting herself into something _unique,_ and while she has little idea what that is, the chance to become her teammate’s equal was well worth the risk of the unknown.

 She’d chased after Sasuke for years for a reason, fought with her parents over her career for the same one. Sakura, despite herself, and certainly despite her mother, had always loved a good challenge.

 --

     Training was hell.

 She knew within the first hour of it that she’d need help. Whatever festering self-hate that had boiled in her gut to allow herself to begin her escapades, she’d won enough pride in the intervening months to prevent her from the applying single-minded dedication to this sort of monotonous pain.  She needed someone else there to keep her honest, and if she’s lucky, distract her from the boredom of it all.

Rock Lee should’ve been the obvious pick, but while she admired him, she couldn’t help but remember his declarations of love at the test. She could sympathize, but she didn’t want to owe the boy anything either, so he’d have to be a last resort. She would’ve tried Ino, but the girl was just as bad as Sakura at taijutsu. She’d asked her own teammates for enough favors, and while both were better than her at it- for now- they weren’t specialists, or the point would be moot. She needs to find someone new.

 Sakura decided to consider her options as she made her way to the market, sweaty from her run but in need of the training weights that had served Lee so well. She was too focused to even notice the glances from the more grossed out civilians, clearly not as used to the strong stench of a workout as the shinobo were.  

 The store she finds her way into is well-stocked, and the part of her that can ignore her miniscule budget admires all of the weapons. _Maybe once I’ve built up my strength, I could try and learn to use a tool?_ She considers it, but doesn’t press too hard, seeing as finding a general teacher is proving hard enough and she doubts finding a specialist would be any easier. One step at a time.

 She struggles to find the weights, however, hidden as they must be among the much more impressive- and extensive- stock of the store, so she makes her way to the front desk and is surprised to find a semi-familiar face there.

“Tenten?”

The girl quickly corrects her posture, seemingly having been dozing off at the front desk, and returns Sakura’s confused glance with one of her own.

“Sakura? What are you doing here?” She asks, before slapping herself on the forehead. “Oh, duh! Weapons. How can I help ya?”

The question is friendly, if distantly polite, and something in Sakura stirs. Nothing deep, or powerful, but a memory: when the bullying had lessened, as a child, and she had met Ino’s friends, and there was the potential to make friends of her own. She’d always been too self-conscious at that age, but now?

“Well, actually- I. Hm. I came here to get some training weights, like your teammate Lee’s-“ she begins.

Tenten is giving an approving hm and it pushes Sakura to remember what little she knows about the girl. She was a class above her, pretty talented, and was a huge fan of Legendary Tsunade. Also, she was nice, and stuck on a team with all boys.

“But now that I’ve run into you, I was wondering if…. you’d be willing to teach me some taijutsu? I know you’re probably super busy but I promise I can return the favor somehow- I make a good practice dummy for my teammates, so maybe you could practice healing my injuries or something since I’m pretty sure you wanna go into medical training and-“ Sakura pauses for breath and realizes she’s maybe not as totally over that self-consciousness as she thought.

Tenten cracks her a big grin and leaps over the counter. “I don’t blame you for not wanting to practice with my teammates, kid, they’re definitely a little crazy. Let’s get you those weights and then draft up a practice schedule- we can figure out how to make it even later, yeah?”

Sakura stumbles after the confident girl as they round the corners of the aisles until they reach the weights, and Tenten stacks a set that’s five pounds heavier than Sakura would’ve gone for. She doesn’t complain, though, and happily follows her back towards the register.

“Really?”

Tenten cackles. “Yeah! Us girls have to stick together, right? Besides- you might not be so thankful once your training starts. I learned from Mighty Gai Sensei just as much as Lee did, you know.”

Sakura doesn’t stop her excited half-bows as she backs out of the store, leaving with a thousand thank-yous and promises to do her best. “You’re the best, Tenten-Sensei!” She calls out, and the warm dose of embarrassment she feels is worth the grin on Tenten’s face at the words.

\--

It’s only a few hours later when Sakura turns her attention towards her more secretive pursuits. Now that she knows she cannot heal anyone, she has to figure out how to weaponize this skill of hers.

 The answer feels rather obvious, once she gives it some thought. Instead of focusing her energy into perfect healings, the type that would require days of rest for the patient, she will focus on fast fixes and learn to perfect them later.

 If she can heal fast, she can stay in the fight longer- she can essentially make her opponents attacks half as effective!

Of course, this means she cannot continue avoiding the more serious injuries. Ever since her single throat-slitting experience, she had been cautious about attempting equally drastic damages- her chakra reserves had certainly grown, but it was risky. _It’ll always be risky if I don’t start practicing,_ she tells herself firmly, and so her mind is made up yet again.

She’ll start with gut wounds. They’re some of the most painful, and have the most variety of ways to go wrong, but they also take the longest to kill you (unless she hits a kidney, but she’ll just have to be very careful not to.)

So, that night, she goes to the familiar spot in the woods that still have touches of rusted red blood spattered on the rocks. She hopes it will rain soon, because if she practices as much as she intends to here, it will begin to look like more than a training accident to anyone who stumbles across the bloodstains. Or maybe she’ll have to start carting cleaning supplies up with her as part of her strength training.

She decides to use a senbon, because it’s sharp and more guided than a kunai, which is important for this first attempt. She won’t push it too far in, just slightly deeper than just below the ribcage, and pull it out slowly. Hopefully, hopefully, she can heal as it exits carefully so that it’s like the injury never fully develops in the first place.

She holds it with both hands, sweaty and sticky even under the cool night breeze. She licks her lips and adjust the position just-so, the tip pressed delicately against the exact spot for the cleanest entry. It’s a swift and fatal motion, and her nervous energy is enough to push it in past where she intended it to go and she pulls it back to quickly to compensate and it hurts _so much._

She is panting heavily because she cannot risk a scream, and her hands are shaking which just aggravates the injury as the senbon shakes with it, and the healing is rushed and disgusting and she fuses the wrong muscles together.

She has to do it again to fix it, and she steels herself to what she now knows it will feel like.

This time, as it slices through the incorrectly knit muscles, she does let out a small scream. It’s a release of some of her tension, thankfully, and it lets her work on healing it cleaner this time around.

\--

It’s a bright and sunny morning, and Kakashi cannot enjoy it, because his pinkest student acting….bizarre.

He knows she’s been acting odd lately, but had been happy to chalk that up to a recent determination to do better in the career once he realized it wasn’t some attempt to win over Sasuke. So he’d let the behavior go, checking every once and a while to make sure she was okay but not prying too far.

 He hadn’t heard of anything bad from around the village, and she only showed bruising or damage after matches where it was obvious she had gotten the scars. If she had gotten herself a teacher in her spare time, it was someone smart enough to know too intense a training practice would do more damage than good. 

 His suspicions, admittedly, had begun to grow when he saw how twitchy she would get around certain questions and certain weapons. She hesitated more than ever to use a kunai, but didn’t seem to mind when she missed a proper catch of it and cut up her hand grabbing them when she’s too slow to dodge. There is a snaking coil of fear in his mind that he has worked very hard to push down, that Sakura _has_ found herself a teacher, but one who teaches secrecy and danger and _just between us,_ that she is better at hiding damage than she is at avoiding it. It’s rare, in a village like theirs, but it happens, and the snake is beginning to tighten its hold on him.

 He knows he has to do something when he sees the way she moves that morning, running laps. She shrugs off the boys’ concerns with complaints of cramps, but she’s holding her stomach too high up for it to be as simple as that. She winces when bends, and she is protective of a spot on her stomach that is normally perfectly safe to hit in spars. She is obviously hurt, and obviously hiding it. It could just be shame at getting the injury in the first place, but he has to be sure.

He’s going to have to do a little recon on his most well-behaved student, and he can only hope it’s occupational paranoia twisting in his gut that drives him to it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> sakura makes a new friend! who's a girl! tenten is great and i'm not a big fan of kishimotos whole "girls only talk to talk about boys" thing (urgh) so expect a cute, boyless friendship forming between the pair. 
> 
> If it's not clear, Kakashi is starting to worry that Sakura is being abused (possibly sexually) because it makes a lot more sense to an outside perspective to assume she'd be getting manipulated and hurt by someone else than that she'd be deliberately hurting herself.


	7. Outsider Perspective

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Kakashi starts to do his job and gets the wrong idea, Sasuke and Naruto are trying, and some med nin make a very comedic mistake.

Kakashi, for once, wakes up early. Today is a day of rarities, because he takes himself to the Shinobi hospital first thing. He ignores the stares when he enters the place- his disdain for hospitals his well-known, after all, especially by the staff- and approaches the front desk.

“Mm, you wouldn’t happen to have records on if any of my students have been here?” He asks. The nurse at the desk gives him a wobbling smile and raises an eyebrow.

“A student of Kakashi willingly getting med help? Not likely, hon.” She tells him, and lets him beat a hasty retreat.

Glad to have gotten the worst of his checklist out of the way, he tries to decide if this is good news or bad. If Sakura was getting abused, she might not risk discovery at a hospital- or she might prefer going to a civilian hospital, since she grew up using those.

He decides, instead, to focus on some more spread-out recon. He finds his way to the market closest to her house and makes himself familiar with the man running the drug store.

“Ah, has my daughter been here recently? About this high, pink hair?” He asks, and the man looks surprisingly relieved at his words.

“Oh, wonderful! Yes she has, sir, bought the usual. What a relief to know her Papa is a shinobi- no wonder she’s been buying so much gauze and disinfectant. I was getting a little concerned, you know.” The man tells him conspiratorially, and Kakashi forces a pleased smile back.

“That’s my daughter, she always worries about me.” He reassures, and bids the man a quick goodbye to ‘go catch up with her’.

A small part of him hopes that she’s just learned to be overcautious- extra supplies for her teammates, maybe? But Kakashi knows optimism is nothing but foolishness in their career, and so he drags himself to her neighborhood and begins to ask questions. The older women, happy to be distracted from their book club, are happy to share as much gossip about the girl as they can.

“I hear she’s got a boyfriend! The type her mother wouldn’t approve of, either.” Says one graying brunette, adding a judgemental bob of her head at the end of her statement.

“Maa, how come?”

She glances around furvitely as if the entire group isn’t part of the discussion, leaning in. “My boy has seen her sneaking out bedroom window almost every night! Doesn’t come back until early morning, either- and often with a _limp,_ if you know what I mean.”

“Ah.” Kakashi says, and pretends he finds this as titillating and hilarious as the old women do as opposed

 Limping can come from training, too. There’s no need to jump to conclusions. He doesn’t need to start blaming himself yet.

_How long have you noticed something was wrong and wrote it off? Why does she not feel like she can trust you with this? You know why, you know, you know._

She had seemed so useless, when he first met her. Defenseless and unwilling to learn. He had wanted her to quit, and when she proved determined to stay, all he could think was that he didn’t want to teach her how to hurt others.

Foolish, foolish.  Didn’t he know that a soft person will be known as defenseless in a village like this? He had teased her so openly, let the boys leave her in the dust so publicly, and had never established a bond with her as someone to trust. Anyone who saw them about- Naruto and Sasuke fighting, Kakashi ignoring them all and focused on his book, Sakura chasing behind and never keeping up- would know _exactly_ how easy it would be to target her. If he was right about what was happening, this was his fault.       

 Now, he just has to figure out what to do now that he’s realized just how horribly he might’ve messed up.

\--

Sakura can’t come to training today because she has a stomach ache- or something like that, Naruto can’t remember- and the boys are spending the time they usually waste waiting for Kakashi (or, recently, trading tricks amongst the three of them) trying to find a gift to give her. It’s Naruto’s idea, but Sasuke refuses to get left out because he doesn’t want to ‘deal with her whining if it’s just from Naruto’. Naruto keeps it to himself that he thinks Sasuke cares about his teammates just as much as they care about him, since Sasuke is probably gonna end up paying for whatever they pick.

Here’s the problem: they can’t agree on anything.

 Naruto thinks they should get her flowers, and Sasuke flicks his forehead and reminds him that her best friend works at a flowershop. “Like she doesn’t already have a million of them, dumbass.”

Naruto rubbed the spot on his forehead and stuck out his tongue. “At least I didn’t suggest we get her some ugly shirt!”

“Her clothes are impractical! That shirt was way more practical.” Sasuke defended.

“Geeze, who knew the famous Uchiha and deadlast cared so much about shopping, guys?”

The boys turned around to spot the source of the taunt, and unfortunately found Kiba smirking at them. God, Naruto hated that guy. There were some older Inuzaka boys with him who seemed only too willing to join in the teasing.

“Wheres your teammate huh, or where you both too girly for her tastes?” Says the tallest one.

“yeah, yeah she’s definitely the manliest looking of you all!” says one who looks a little younger than the other two, and Naruto growls.

“Shut up, she’s sick is all! ‘Sides, you’re just jealous that- that-“ And Naruto stutters off, too angry to think of an insult.

“That _we_ don’t have fleas.” Sasuke finishes cooly, already turning around and grabbing Naruto’s arm to drag him away.

“H- Hey! Not cool, we SO don’t have fleas! You’re the ones’ with fleas!”

“Great comeback, I can see why your clan isn’t known for it’s brains.” Sasuke spit out.

“Whatever! At least we don’t do whatever a _girl_ tells us!”

If Sasuke was less annoyed, he’d probably point out that Kiba has a female jounin. As it stands, he can only agree with Naruto’s shouted, “NU-UH!” and force him into another store.

“Ugh, dumb dogs.” Naruto grumbles, nose twitching oddly. Then he glances around. “think she’d like one of those?” He adds, pointing towards the ugliest snowglobes that Sasuke has ever seen.

This is going to be a long, long day- and Sasuke refuses to admit he’s kind of enjoying it.

\--

Their paths rarely cross, given how busy they are and how few med nins there are to spare, but Kia has taken an early lunch and Shino (But not _bug_ Shino) has been working in the records trying to find a particular scroll and has only just escaped it to eat his late breakfast. As med nin, the first half of their conversation is professional, and by the secondhalf they’re swapping stories of the unusual and trying to one-up each other.

“Hey, that’s nothing! Did I tell you about the guy who got _two_ forbidden scrolls stuck up his butt?” Kia says, gesturing with a fork at his face.

Shino snorts, nodding. “Actually, you have.”

“Oh.” She pauses to think and then lights up. “Well, hey, how ‘bout this- I had a patient with like, _weirdly bendy_ bones back during the exams!”

“Oh, is that the scientific term for it?” he teased, and she gave him a shove.

“Yes, actually, totally. No, I dunno Shino, it was just like- she’d been getting her guts crushed in, yeah? Her teammate saw it said he thought they _t_ otally caved in! But when I did an inspection, there were some starts to cracks and they were starting to dig in, but not a single one snapped! Total miracle, saved me so much chakra energy, I tell ya. I made a note in her file but she didn’t have a record of issues. I think maybe it’s like Shio-Sensei’s evolution theory.”

“God, not Sensei’s ninja-are-evolving-into-a-different-species-shino-just-look-at-the-evidence thing AGAIN, Kia! I’m _so_ sick of it.”

Kia laughed. “Ha, your face! No, it’s probably just another random genetic oddity that Sensei will _take_ as proof for his dumb theory.”

Shino shook his head and took a bite out of her sandwich as revenge. “Whatever, like bendy bones are that weird. _I_ had a patient during the exams who got totally mauled by a wall of sand and she showed up with like, only second-degree skin exposure at worst. I thought she had some dumb vaguely-stoney-skin clan bloodline thing but it turned out she was just a lucky civvie kid.”

Kia stilled, shooting him a weird look. “She was a civilian? Did she have, uh, pink hair?”

“Yeah, how’d you know?” Shino asked, before connecting the dots.

“Oh, man. You don’t think Sensei could be, uh-“

“-On to something? Nah, no way! It’s…..it’s just coincidence.”

“yeah, yeah! A pink haired girl is- is bound to be a genetic anomly in more ways than one, right?”

“Totally.” Shino finished, but they ate the rest of their meal in contemplative silence.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> had some people wanting to hear what's going on with Kakashi right now, so I thought it would be fun to show a couple outsider perspectives this chapter! 
> 
> that last one is especially light-hearted, partially because next chapter, Sakura's about to get, uh.... Dissection-y. I'm warning y'all ahead of time so you can decide for yourself if you want to read that, because if not, just re-read this ending section instead of chapter 8's ending section, okay?


	8. Friendship and flagellation

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Lessons and practice and something gross: this is what little ninja are made of. (also what this chapter is made of).

Tenten wasn’t kidding about taking training seriously.

She starts Sakura off with stretches that make muscles burn that Sakura has previously only known about from medical texts. Then, she cheerful sets them off at a jog- for the first of fifty laps around the village. She gives Sakura a cheeky grin and informs her, “By next week, I’ll expect you do a hundred laps at a sprint.”

Sakura does not say anything because she’s pretty sure it’s inappropriate to cuss out your sensei. Tenten must sense it anyways, because she lets out a laugh before picking up the pace, and Sakura begrudgingly follows suit.

They move on to pushups, situps, and pull ups. Sakura is already fully exhausted by the end of the sets, but Tenten refuses to have her rest- “as soon as you settle you won’t be able to get back up!” she informs her, and pushes Sakura towards the training ground with _way_ too much energy.

“There are a ton of types of taijutsu, so I’m going to run you through the basics of a few of them and we’ll see which suits you best.” Tenten says, demonstrating the first style quickly before jumping out of the position to adjust Sakura’s wobbly attempt to duplicate it.

She has the lunge position correct, but can’t quite get her toes pointed in the right direction, so Tenten moves her on to the next style. This one is even harder to keep, delicate and airy, clearly designed to focus on dodging and quick attack maneuvers. Tenten huffs at her terrible attempt to match the stance and admits, “I was hoping you’d use the same style as me, but clearly this isn’t a good fit.”

They try a couple more styles before settling on a deeply rooted one- a style based on the user having a lot of physical strength, so instead of nimbly dodging or getting in quick, barely-there hits, they move as little as possible and take a brunt-force attack style. It’s aggressive, certainly, and a part of Sakura sings at that, but she has to ask, “Aren’t I too weak for this form?”

Tenten snorts. “Not for long, kid. I’ve got _plans._ ”

Somehow, Sakura finds it in herself to forgive Tenten for the grueling workout and humiliating run-through of forms, proof of how little Sakura knows right now, all for that. She’s got someone planning ahead for her. Someone is paying attention to her development!

Tenten must see the fire in her eyes at the words, because she shifts into that airy stance she’d shown Sakura earlier and twitches her fingers. “Okay, enough relaxing- time to spar!”

Sakura loses. Badly.

It’s an hour later, after they do cool-off stretches and light jogging and Sakura has chugged her water and they’ve both collapsed on the grass, when Tenten tells the girl that she’s getting her a sparring partner in a week or so.

“Way talented, super good at pointing out weak spots. Owes me big time so you’re gonna get more than just the next lesson with them, guaranteed.” Tenten says, and Sakura groans. She’s dreading finding out who _Tenten_ considers talented in taijutsu after the thorough beatdown Sakura just received.

“Do I get to find out who this mysterious helper is?” She asks, and tenten pokes her cheek.

“Of course! When they show up for the spar, that is.” Tenten replies, and Sakura discovers she has enough breath left in her to release an even longer groan of protest.

“God, sensei, you’re the worst.” She says, and pretends she doesn’t see the way Tenten brighten at the words.

It’s two days later before Sakura feels like she has enough energy, post-lesson and pre-team training, to actually do anything besides eat and rest. So she goes and finds Naruto, and asks him to help her practice fighting more than one opponent at a time.

“Of course, Sakura-chan! But, uh, how can I do that, exactly?” Naruto asks sheepishly, and Sakura holds back a snort at his expense. _He’s trying to be helpful, be nice!_

“Your clones, Naruto-chan?” Sakura hints.

“Oh! Oh, that, yeah!” He says, before it registers that she used the same friendly ‘chan’ that he always used with her and he straightens up. “Ah, ah, I promise I’ll be a great training partner, Sakura-chan!”

When his clones burst into existence, he spends a few minutes sternly informing them to not be too hard on Sakura as if they aren’t, essentially, extensions of himself. Sakura wonders if she ever would’ve thought she would one day find Naruto this _adorable,_ and concludes that she’d just have to accept her ever-growing affection for her teammates with as much sincerity as she could.

She has to try very hard to keep her promise by the end of the three-on-one spar that leaves her a bit bloody and bruised and tired, but it’s hard to stay mad when she knows that for all his bluster, he didn’t go easy on her.

\--

Sakura begins her inspection early, in her room, while her parents are out to dinner with friends and won’t be back for hours. She didn’t want to do this in the woods at night, when the whole purpose is to truly see what she’s doing. Surgeons don’t operate in the dark- eventually, she should be able to, but she’s just starting out and intends to cut herself some slack.

She’s laid out towels on her carpet to catch and blood and has her reference books splayed out around her to the most relevant pages, just in case. Her door is locked, her window closed, and she’s put up seals to keep anyone from spying in. She sits down and considers the angle before grabbing her hand mirror and lying flat- she doesn’t want gravity working against her just yet.

  She remembers in the illustrations for some of the more educational books had shown surgeons using chakra as scalpels and had been practicing making the false-blades for days in preparation. Sakura is pleased to see her hand does not shake when she brings her chakra’s tip towards her stomach, the mirror angled so that she can perfectly see what she’s doing. _I’m getting better at handling this!_ She thinks, and presses in delicately.

It hurts, especially to much so slowly, but there’s something beautiful in the motion of it that she can lose herself in. She had rolled up some gauze and stuffed it in her mouth so that she could clench through the more painful parts, which proves handy- when she has almost made a rectangle, she lifts the flap of skin and muscles and stares into the mirror.

So that’s what she looks like inside. Hn.

She faints, and wakes up seconds later with her arms sprawled. The only that had been holding the mirror, thankfully, and fallen along her side- the mirror hadn’t even shattered. The one she’d been using as a chakra blade had landed on the inside of her pulled back flap, but not on her exposed organs, for which she is immensely grateful- her arm is bloody and her body is screaming in discomfort, but she thinks the pressure of her arm against her entrails would be far worse. 

 She refuses to let this be a waste. She has to learn. She stares, resolutely, at her parts, thinking back to lists and illustrations and comparing them to reality. She points, carefully, spitting out the gauze, and names:

“Pancreas. Gallbladder. Stomach. Large intestine, small intestine.”

She feels lightheaded, but repeats the list, allowing herself to continue skipping the organs hidden beneath the ones she can easily spot in the reflection.

“Pancreas. Gallbladder. Stomach. Large intestine, small intestine. Pancreas, gallbladder, stomach, large intestine, small intestine. Pancreas-“

It becomes a mantra, until her finger does not have to move or flick and her thoughts can turn to safety. She sends a spark of chakra through her system as disinfectant, before setting the mirror down and slowly sliding the ‘flap’ back into place. _It looks like a little door._ She thinks, with a dizzy giggle, and she draws a finger along the bloody lines of connection as she heals the separation back together. Perfect, perfect, perfect- she goes slowly and carefully until there’s no trace of a blemish, no hint of a scar.

She collapses her head back against the floor and allows herself to close her eyes for a moment, before forcing herself up and to work. She has to hide the evidence, wash her arm, document notes, all before her parents return. She can already tell that when she goes to sleep, it will be a long while before she wakes up- her chakra is exhausted and her limbs are heavy.

All in all, it’s a good day’s work.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I like to think Tenten always wanted a little sister, and totally wants to be a jounin-sensei one day, which is why she's so quick to embrace her roll as Sakura's taijutsu trainer. That's also why she's calling Sakura "kid" despite the age gap only being one or two years. Who's the special guest trainer she's managed to wheel in for her favorite (only) student? Well, you can probably guess, but it's not rock lee because he's EXHAUSTING to write. 
> 
> Ah, and what's Kakashi up to, you may ask? Right now, desperately trying to find a Real Adult (tm) to tell him what the hell to do about his situation. Honestly, Tenten might be the most responsible sensei in this village :/


	9. Highlander Haruno

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sakura gets some ideas, has a positive breakdown (?), and Kakashi loves to deliver cliffhangers.

 

With such a full schedule, Sakura is amazed to find she still has time to try and plan ahead. It feels like every day she adds a new task to her list, but it’s not necessarily a heavy burden. She’s putting the weight of Konoha on her back and is finding it surprisingly easy to carry, all things considered: she’s getting stronger, and it’s not fast enough- never, ever fast enough, always behind her teammates- but that just makes her try harder.

Eventually, measuring herself up to the others and falling short will ruin her. For now, she lets it serve as the motivator it has been, pushing her to do more, to do worse things, than anyone else would be willing to. They don’t have to do what she does to get as half as strong as they are, and she can’t let resentment stop her growth.

She spends her evenings experimenting with dissection. She grows familiar enough with her organs to begin cutting small slices in them and then healing them- first, holding them together with an invisible line of chakra, and then sealing it back together. Soon enough this is manageable, a surprisingly small amount of chakra needed compared to how precise her control must be for it, and she begins to experiment in removing small parts and forcing new cells to grow and replace them. At first, she dulls her nerves while doing this, because she cannot risk passing out mid-surgery, but she hopes soon enough to release that limit and adjust fully to the pain of hurt-heal-hurt.

She does not want to start removing her organs just yet, however, and this sparks an idea: perhaps she can practice forming full, new organs, _outside_ of her body first. She could master the theory, and a majority of the task, without risking the inherent danger of fully destroying essential parts.

  The idea tickles a part of her brain that she can’t scratch until after a practice session with Naruto.

She’s sweaty and disgusting and cannot believe Naruto still finds her cute by the end of it, but he begs for attention as much as usual.

“Sakura-chan, look! I finally figured out Sasuke’s fire jutsu, just wait until the bastard sees!” He crows, drawing his hands quickly to his face and letting out a near-perfect stream of fire towards a tree and leaves a bare scorch mark on it.

She decides not to comment on how long it had taken her teammate to master the move and instead pats him on the back. “Great job, Naruto-chan!” She says, and unfortunately the boy decides this is exactly the right encouragement to set up starting more fires with more enthusiasm- and less control.

The first few bursts- broken up with little shouts of satisfaction, “Take that, Sasuke!” and “Ha-ha, dead on!”- are fine enough, but the last two result in a small grass fire that Sakura has to put out with her water bottle and a scorched lizard.

As soon as Naruto realizes he’s hit the thing his eyes start to give a tale-tell wobble that he’s going to cry, and Sakura rushes to reassure him. “Don’t worry Naruto-chan, it got his tail!”

This does not improve the situation, and she presses forward to clarify, “This kind of lizard can lose a tail and grow it back. He’ll be fine!”

“Really? They can do that?”

“Oh, yeah! It takes about two months but then it’s good as new.”

Now Naruto is looking at her like she’s a genius and at the lizard like it’s the Hokage. “Wow, Sakura, you know so much! How come it can do that?”

She blushes and shrugs off the compliment, saying, “My mom told me about it a couple years ago. I don’t really know why.”

The conversation moves on, to what else lizards can do and if a tail is really that useful, all things considered, but there’s that itch in Sakura’s brain that’s finally getting scratched.

 If she can repair organs, she should be able to grow new ones- and if she can grow new organs, why can’t she grow new limbs?

 So she settles in for a satisfyingly difficult study on exactly _how_ lizards can grow back parts, because she would prefer to start with a solid theory before she starts chopping off her limbs, even if the idea of how much it might hurt is as much a motivator as it is a deterrent.

To her absolute delight, it’s even better than she first thought. Apparently, it’s not even instinct for the lizard: it’s genetically built in.

 There are parts along their tail with bundles of code hidden away that are only activated if it gets sliced in half, and then _boom,_ the process begins to form a new one. The genetic information is right there, waiting for when it’s needed, like a chakra reserve that you don’t need to think about to activate.

 Sakura falls asleep with dizzying thoughts of arms that can grow back mid-fight and the beautifully complexity of a built-in, genetic security system, and she dreams of six-armed women defending the village from giant reptiles.

She never used to dream like this, instead slipping into fantasies of boys with black eyes and of flower fields and friendship, but it’s not a complaint.

\--

It’s a few days later, when team seven has met up early for more splitting of trade secrets, when Naruto asks if Sakura wants to teach them anything. Sasuke gives her a prodding look, as if to say the same.

She bursts into tears instantly and can’t stop for the life of her.

Both boys look accusingly at each other, and she doesn’t stop herself from laughing, which is enough to throw their staring contest off, or at least redirect it towards her.

They want _her_ to teach _them._ They think she has something to offer! Sakura, something to give back. She wipes hastily at her face and gives them a big smile and pretends to not notice she has some snot on her face that she really hopes Sasuke-kun doesn’t see.

“I have some ideas.” She tells them, before dragging them towards the practice area with a resoluteness that she normally reserves for surgery.

 “Naruto, I’m going to teach you the academy genjutsu, since you never managed to master it in class.” She says.

“Ha, hear that, bastard? Sakura-chan’s going to teach _me_ something and not you!” Naruto says, sticking his tongue out at their teammate. Sasuke scoffs.

“Yeah, because you failed the kiddie classes at it and need the extra help.”

Sakura rolls her eyes. She loves her boys, she really does, but sometimes….

“I’m not teaching Sasuke because he’s going to practice breaking it with his sharingan.” She informs them both, and they seem to brighten at the challenge. Of course, doing this means she’s essentially pitting them against each other in a battle of wills, which doesn’t bode well for the training area. It is promising for the end results, however, so she figure’s its worth the sacrifice.

 She finds herself sheepishly trying to explain this to Kakashi when he finally arrives, only to find Naruto with a black eye, Sasuke with a bloody nose, and half the equipment snapped in two. 

It’s only after the particularly rough training session- _really, Kakashi-sensei is far too petty when it comes to punishments_ \- and the boys have been sent off to spar that Kakashi says,

“Ah, Sakura, please stay behind. I think it’s time we had a little talk, don’t you?”

_Well, shit._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> did you know we only recently figured out how lizards grow back their tales? Seriously, for years we've known they could do it and it was just like..... "yup, that's a thing, nature sure is wild." 
> 
> next chapter: kakashi is a responsible adult, sakura gets her new sparring partner, and she also takes one of her theories and puts it into practice. It'll be a longer chapter, to say the least.


	10. Hit me with your best shot

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Kakashi does his best, Sakura makes a new friend (even if he won't admit it yet), and a bubble pops.

“So, um, what do you want to talk about, Kakashi-Sensei?” Sakura asks, shuffling in place next to the man awkwardly. She knows, rationally, that he’s probably just going to tell her off more about encouraging Sasuke and Naruto’s rivalry. A small part of her hopes he’s going to offer her some more one-on-one training like Sasuke sometimes gets, encouragement for the improvements she’s made. Unfortunately, all she can think is that she’s been caught, he knows what she’s been doing, he’s going to make her stop and _he’s going to get mad and he’s going to tell me I can’t be a genin anymore-_

“Well, Sakura…. Mm.” Her teacher pauses. They both, futilely, wish that this conversation would end here. “I’ve been growing…. Concerned about some of your habits.”

_My habits? Habits? He does know, he must know, he’s onto me-_

“Haha, um, what habits, Sensei?” she stalls.

He moves as if to put a hand on her shoulder and she flinches away. His expression turns infinitesimally sadder at the motion, and he shifts his stance so he’s not facing her directly, his body hunched inwards to look smaller. She’s never seen a ninja try to look weaker before, especially not one as powerful as her sensei, and Sakura has no idea what to do with his reaction. He can’t be _scared_ of her, so it must be something else, but what?

 “Sakura, is there…. Anyone in your life that makes you uncomfortable?” He asks, a hand rubbing uncomfortably on his neck. They’re still walking away from the boys, to who knows where, and she stumbles a little at the words and tries to hide her embarrassment that she, a _ninja,_ tripped.

“Uhm.” She pauses, trying to think about it. It must be important if Kakashi-Sensei is taking the time to ask her about it, but she really doesn’t see the point. “Well, Rock-Lee sometimes gets on my nerves, I guess, but he’s not so bad lately now that Tenten yells at him. And those Sand Nin where really scary, but they haven’t been around since the exams. So not really?”

“That’s not exactly what I- well, ah, what I meant was, Sakura… is there, um, anything you’d like to tell me?”

Her heart drops into her stomach. Was the first question just to soften her up? Is it worse if she tells him or if she keeps hiding it? What if he doesn’t know and she tells him and-

She squeaks out a, “No, definitely not!” before she can come up with a more believable answer.

Kakashi sighs, sliding his hands into his pockets and tilting his head back. This is probably as painful for him as it is for her- Sakura has a feeling her Sensei is not used to trying to get answers from people without his fists.

 “Are there any adults who make you uncomfortable, then?”

When he sees her pause, he adds, “You won’t get in trouble, I promise.”

She finds that hard to believe, if only because he might be powerful but he’s still just a jounin-sensei and he’s definitely outranked by a lot of people, but it doesn’t really matter. She paused at the words because she doesn’t know how to say that she doesn’t _know_ any adults, doesn’t have any in her life enough to make her feel much of anything. Her family is distant and busy, if supportive, and her teachers have never payed her much mind. Still, she doesn’t want to let him down, and she racks her brain for any memories at all of interacting with adults. Maybe this is a training method, practice searching your memories for something that seemed insignificant at the time?

“Well, I mean, I don’t like how the shopkeeper at the general store talks to Naruto-chan. Or how some of the teachers talked to Sasuke-kun. And Naruto’s teacher is a little…. Weird.”

They stop walking, and she can see that Kakashi-sensei’s hands are struggling to stay at his side. “Ah, how so?” 

She tilts her head and scrunches up her face at the memory. “He’s always trying to get me to say yes to Naruto’s flirting, it’s really annoying. He doesn’t even remember my name but he thinks he can talk me into dating the dobe anyways!”

“Is that the only reason?”

“Oh, yeah, that’s all! I don’t see him that much, anyways, so it’s no big deal. He ignores me if Naruto isn’t around, you know?” Most people ignore her if one of her teammates isn’t with her, actually. It’s probably the most normal thing about Naruto’s personal teacher.

This conversation is getting more confusing for her as time goes on, because she could’ve sworn she’d done exactly what he’d asked her too but he looks more frustrated than he did before. Was she missing the point of this exercise?

“Is anyone _hurting you,_ Sakura?” Kakashi asks, and now that he’s getting straight to the point it clicks for her.

 Maybe it’s an obligatory check that all sensei have to do at some point, or maybe a misunderstanding over something she said, but he thinks someone might be- doing _that_ sort of thing to her. She turns bright red at the suggestion and hastily waves her arms into something of an ‘x’.

“Definitely not, Sensei! I’m- I’m totally fine! I’d- I’d tell you if, uh, someone even _tried_ to-“ She stuttered off, still shaking her head. It’s not entirely true- until this conversation, she didn’t realize he would care if something like that happened, _maybe because it can affect your training or your focus in the field?-_ but she’d definitely tell someone. Probably Iruka-sensei, since he’d always seemed non-judgmental and willing to listen to her lesser complaints when she was in the academy. (At the very least she’d feel obligated to report it if it was someone with rank, in case they tried to do the same thing to someone in their care.)

“Ah, that’s good to know.” Kakashi says, and she’s relieved to see that he looks flustered too, so it’s not just her who’s suffering through this conversation.

“IsitalrightifIgocatchupwiththeboysnow?”

She’s too embarrassed to even break the words apart, but he seems to understand her regardless, and nods her off back towards her teammates and she takes off at a sprint, leaving her Sensei to try and figure if she’s lying- and, if she’s not, what the _hell_ is causing her weird behavior instead.

 _God, I need some advice from an actual adult who knows what they’re doing._ It’s a thought he’s had often enough before- especially when he had Sasuke Uchiha assigned to his team- but this is the first time he manages to swallow his pride enough to decide to go through with it.

\--

Sakura is trying very, _very_ hard to forget yesterday’s conversation, and Tenten is only happy to help.

“You should’ve heard when Guy had asked _my_ team. I love my sensei, but man, he does not have a way with words.”

Sakura hopes it won’t be long before she can laugh at the memory as much as Tenten does, because right now it just makes her turn bright red and kinda wish she was dead. It helps hearing the girl joke about it, and even as worn out as she is, Sakura can manage to push out a laugh from her exhausted lungs when Tenten tells her that Guy-Sensei had decided it was important to make sure they’d all had The Talk, too, and poor Neji had nearly self-combusted.

They’ve been doing pushups and just started situps, which usually means it’s almost time to spar, but apparently Sakura’s new training partner is finally back from a mission and she’s going to get her ass beat by a stranger instead. She’s not really looking forward to it, even though she objectively understands that it’s going to be better for her in the long run. She’s a little sick of getting embarrassed by how weak she is in front of people, and adding to the list of people witnessing that weakness first hand isn’t exactly a dream of hers.

 Her determination to accept it without complaint deteriorates as soon as her partner shows up.

“ _Neji?”_ She asks, turning to give Tenten as disbelieving and furious a look as she can manage. Those two emotions don’t mashup so well, but it’s certainly how she’s feeling. Tenten chuckles at the look and rolls her shoulders, replying sweetly, “I told you he owed me big time.”

“Your student is Naruto’s teammate?” Neji says, a judgmental look directed at her long pink hair and uncertain stance. At least he’d grown enough as a person he’s not calling her Sasuke’s teammate, but still- she doesn’t like that he thinks he can judge her so easily. He met her for what, all of five minutes?

“My name’s _Sakura,_ Tenten’s teammate.” She spits back, and his eyebrows barely raise at the words. Tenten laughs even louder and mutters something about how ‘funny this is going to be’ and Sakura is envious of her senpai’s jovial mood for the second time that day.

“Tenten, what exactly am I supposed to do to help ‘Sakura’ with her abysmal form?”

“Point out her weak spots. And don’t _totally_ break her doing it.”

Sakura is pretty sure he doesn’t plan on keeping his promise.

His first jab is directed straight for her ribs, and she manages to block it with her arm, but she still gets a nasty bruise for her trouble. His next move is a swipe at her legs, and she’s still too unsteady in the position to keep herself from tumbling over. She pulls herself back up and gets back into the position, and the Hyuuga sets about pointing out her other flaws. Her many, _many_ flaws.

She begins to fight back after a few minutes of the degradation, lashing out with the kind of poor strikes she’d been struggling to get by on as an academy student. She never manages to land a hit, never really expected too, but at least Neji stops looking at her like she’s completely incompetent and more like a pet project he only half wants to throw in the trash. She’s sore and bruised all over by the end of it, but she begrudgingly has to admit that her stance is stronger and her transitions between positions are getting smoother.

Neji says she’s, “not as awful as she could be, all things considered”, and Sakura decides it worth the probable black eye to throw herself on the boy in a hug that Naruto would’ve been proud of for its voracity. Before Neji can react, Tenten wraps herself around the pair of them and gives them both a noogie. His ire is instantly directed entirely at his own teammate instead of Sakura herself, much to the girl’s satisfaction.

It’s honestly pretty nice, and she finds herself reevaluating the boy. If anyone can learn to appreciate a withdrawn clan boy, it’s going to be her, right? He means well, even if he’s way too uppity, and he seems to have a soft spot for Tenten so he can’t be all bad.

She calls out, “Can’t wait to fight you again next week, senpai!” When she leaves, and smirks at his spluttered rage and Tenten’s cackle as she runs away.

She takes the evening off from experimenting and focuses her chakra on healing her bruises. The very next day, however, she sets about putting into practice the first of her theories: growing an organ outside her body.

She decides to make a heart, despite it’s complexity, because it’s a mass of tissues as opposed to a tube or container of some sort and she’s not yet ready to try and create something with a distinctive inside and outside. Besides, she has no way of knowing when she’s going to need her new skills, and a heart seems like the most essential thing to master for the sake of survival in the field.

She struggles to start from scratch, so instead she cuts a very small piece of skin off from her thigh and works hard on transforming it into a heart. It works, partially, if it’s slightly off-color and too small, and she attempts to push just the right amount of chakra into it to get pumping.

Instantly, the thing blows up from the burst of power, and she finds herself splattered in blood and bits of- well, anyways, it’s very gross. She blinks once, twice, and then shakes herself out of the haze and tries again.

Three attempts later and she’s exhausted her chakra, and while she’s gotten more accurate each time with the heart itself- and she’s nearly ready to attempt it without the skin graft to jumpstart the practice- getting it pumping is still proving futile, unless she missed the part in medical textbooks where hearts are supposed to explode instead of beat. Urgh.

She sets herself to clean up, a particularly nasty task this time around, and figuring out how to discreetly burn her clothes. These aren’t the type of bloodstained-clothing that she thinks she could explain away as a training accident.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 1) while Kakashi only talks to Sakura about it out of suspicions, i genuinely think Guy is a good enough Sensei that he'd ACTUALLY do a check-in with his "group of thirteen year old soldiers in a military dictatorship" that like, nobody's abusing the system to assault them/groom them. Then Guy would realize that like, the school definitely doesn't teach sex ed and it's His RESPONSIBILITY as their teacher to ensure they are smart and well prepared when the time comes, if the time ever comes, bla bla bla. Guy is weird but he really does seem like one of the most supportive and 'parental' of all the jounin-sensei we actually see interact with their kids.
> 
> 2) honestly not a big deal but, uh, just realized as I was writing about Sakura not having an excuse for the bloodstains on her clothes that she probably hasn't had her first period yet. She's only thirteen, so it would be an early start, especially when her eating habits were so bad in canon & they don't have the weird hormone issues we have nowadays that're causing puberty to hit earlier and earlier. It's just weird to consider how much stuff she's been dealing with and she hasn't even, like, gotten acne or had a period or hit a growth spurt- and her friends probably haven't either, with the exception of maybe tenten?? these kids are SO YOUNG, GUYS!!! 
> 
> up next: sakura has an ethical dilemma, team seven actually has fun outside of training, and kakashi gets questionable advice.


	11. Ethics and Eunuchs

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sakura does some think, the gang has a Shopping Montage, and kakashi gets some advice.

Sakura had spent the past week perfecting her method for growing hearts.

She was getting pretty good at it- it had taken about five days to get the hearts to stop exploding, frustratingly enough, but she’d managed to perfect the kickstart to the creation process without having to take a skingraft. Instead, she started it from her hand and then pushed its growth from there, severing the skin’s connection to the heart at the end of its growth process. It was admittedly a very disgusting feeling, but she found she didn’t much mind when on the sixth day, she managed to feed the heart a slow tunnel of chakra and built up it’s heart rate to the appropriate amount.

She’d made a heart! A near-perfect duplicate of the one that already beat in her chest, resting in the palm of her hand. It was the most beautiful thing she’d ever seen. She felt confident she could start experimenting with her other organs now that she’d mastered the principle of it, and she decided to end the session a little early today as a reward.

On her walk back from the patch in the woods where she practiced- wearing a change of clothes she’d kept hidden in her bag to protect it from the blood splatter- she begins to consider the usefulness of her new ability. She knew civilian doctors could transplant dead hearts into people who needed them, and med nin had perfect the ability even further. There was always a shortage of useable organs, though, because it’s not like they’re getting fully-intact dead bodies showing up in the morgue every-day. That meant priority went to important shinobi and clan heads, and the rich. Sakura had learned that the hard way as a young child, when her uncle needed a new kidney- kidney, she had to learn how to make new kidneys next- but he wasn’t important enough to make the top of the list and he’d died in the hospital waiting for a replacement part that would never come.

 Sakura can make hearts. Brand new hearts, perfect and easy to transplant. She might not be able to do the transplanting herself, with her chakra issues, but she could easily build a heart modeled off the person’s original one and then let a skilled surgeon do the rest. How many hearts had she made in the past week alone? How many lives could she save? Especially once she perfects the rest of the organs, she could-

  _Sakura, you idiot, how are you going to get the organs to them._

She wanted to punch herself, settled for slapping herself full-force in the face. It left a sticky bloody handprint on her face, but she kept walking, furious with herself for getting so carried away.

 It’s not like she could donate them anonymously. Dropping off boxes filled with human hearts would certainly attract attention, and she had no delusions that they wouldn’t be able to track it back to her somehow. Tracking nin are terrifying and she has no training on avoiding them.

 If she wanted to provide a steady supply of organs to the hospital, she’d have to do it face to face, show them exactly where the hearts come from, and they’d ask _questions._

Questions she can’t answer, which just brings her back to tracking nin and what they do after they find you, hand you over to a Yamanaka to have it dragged out of you that way. She can’t do that.

She belatedly thinks about faking her death, if they could take her heart that way and then she could regrow it and escape, but- there were a thousand more problems with that idea than the previous two, and she slaps herself again for even considering it.  

 Maybe if there was a war on…..maybe if there was war, she would do it. But there isn’t, so perhaps- perhaps there’s enough organs in the system as it is.

It’s uncomfortable, knowing she’s weighing her own safety against those of the people of this village. Strangers she’s sworn to protect. But….

That idea is good enough that she doesn’t slap herself for it. It felt like she’d made her first decision as a shinobi, and she wasn’t entirely satisfied with it, but maybe that’s just what being an adult is like. Hard decisions with troubling choices, trying to pick the most ethical out of your limited options.

 Something tells her it is, but she allows herself to hope it isn’t as she makes her way back to her house in the cool night air.

 

 The very next day, Sakura throws herself into spending the day with her teammates. Most of her wardrobe has been ruined from her experimenting, and she’d like to get some cute replacement clothes. Maybe if she’s lucky, she can talk Naruto into buying something that’s not bright orange, and she could even talk Sasuke into wearing a new outfit. His main one is starting to stink, and as much as she loves him, she’s pretty sure he hasn’t done laundry in his entire life and it’s kinda gross.

“I wanna buy new clothes, let’s go!” She calls out, and they’re surprisingly willing to go.

“Psch, you could use something more practical.” Sasuke says, allowing her to draw him by the arm towards the market. Just for that, Sakura gives a dramatic sniff to the air, looks at him, and says,

“And you could use a bath, Sasuke-kun.”

Naruto bursts out in delighted laughter and Sasuke turns a shade of pink that Sakura had never seen before. She should really do this more often, if that’s how he reacts!

“Na, na, does that mean I get to see you try on pretty dresses?” Naruto asks, and she shoots him a look that makes him cow. “I didn’t mean it like that! I, uh- HEY, WHAT ABOUT THAT ONE?” He suggests, quickly trying to distract her by gesturing towards a dress on a rack near them.

 _He’s lucky it’s cute._ She lets herself be distracted.

She sets them off with missions of their own in the store- Naruto has to find something _not orange_ for himself, and Sasuke has to find literally anything so long as it’s clean. When he hesitates, she whispers, “Don’t worry, Sasuke-kun, I can embroider the Uchiha crest on it for you.”

He brushes it off but he doesn’t hesitate in shopping anymore, and Sakura is relieved to find at least one of her girls-only academy classes was paying off. (admittedly, she was particularly confident about making the Uchiha crest since she used to practice making it for when she married Sasuke-kun, but what he doesn’t know won’t hurt him and _certainly_ won’t hurt her.)

When Naruto comes back with a neon green pair of sweatpants, she realizes that leaving him unsupervised was the worst decision she could’ve made and sets about dragging him around the store and grabbing actually feasible clothes. He pouts at some of the suggestions and she finds herself acquiescing more and more to his ridiculous taste just to make him smile a bit more, and resolutely does not have _any_ thoughts when she catches him shirtless while trying on one of the outfits because she loves Sasuke and Naruto is dumb and she hates puberty and everything that it entails, so could her brain shut up now, please? Thankfully, it does as soon as she sees him put on the hideous orange shirt he’d managed to sneak past her while she had been picking out a tasteful dark green pair of shorts for him, the ungrateful little punk. At least her hormones have a good sense of fashion.

 She’d be disappointed in her own success, since she only had time to grab a single outfit for herself and it was relatively basic- black shirt, black pants, green skirt and green jacket- but to her immense surprise, Sasuke had been thoughtful enough to buy another two sets of clothes for her. Sasuke, _thoughtful,_ who would’ve guessed?

She didn’t say anything when he slipped over the bag except to brag about getting Naruto to buy a _dark_ blue ensemble that was kind of close to black and thus, technically, practical.

They show up later to practice then Kakashi does and none of them much mind. For once, Kakashi doesn’t bother scolding them, instead leaping right into training. Apparently even the most cold-hearted of jounin-sensei can sometimes be persuaded by tiny, smiling faces and a newfound sense of comradery. That, or he understands even his most basic spars are more than enough of a punishment.

To Sakura’s immense relief, she’s not held back at the end of this training session for another talk. Kakashi has somewhere to be and for once, he’s not going to be late.

 He makes it to the bar in record time, and he can see the surprised looks at his arrival. He had a lot of coping mechanisms that you could dub questionable, but he’d been very firm in avoiding alcoholism. Spotting him at a bar was a small shock to most of the shinobi there who knew him.

 “Ah, Anko, I’m relieved you were able to meet with me.” He says, sliding into the seat next to the woman.

 “Someone asks for my advice, they _must_ be desperate.” She says, shrugging as she takes a long sip of beer. “How could I say no?”

So maybe he’d fudged a bit when he said he was going to find a proper responsible adult, but he didn’t think he actually knew any. Beside Iruka, but he had a feeling that Anko would perhaps be a better person to ask about this. If anyone would know about vulnerable girls getting manipulated…

“It’s about one of my students.” He says, and she gets the implications instantly, scanning the bar and spots at least three nin listening in.

“Sounds like a conversation for the road, babe. Pay my tab and we’ll call it even.” She tells him, hopping off her perch on the stool and making her way to the door. He covers the cost of her six beers, crossing his fingers that it’s not a total waste of money because that’s a pretty hefty pricetag for questionable advice. He just manages to catch up with her as she rounds the corner, and they set about the conversation with more conviction this time, free on listening ears.

“I’m concerned for her wellbeing.” He says, and Anko snorts.

“Mistake number one for a sensei, but go on.”

“She has been…..displaying worrying signs, lately. And when I asked her about them she-“

“Lied? Yeah, well, no duh, bud. I mean, good for you for trying, but did you really think that would work?”

Kakashi shoots her a glare, waiting for her to elaborate, because he had actually thought it would work, if he was lucky.

“She’s got no reason to trust you. She’d only be in a dangerous place if she didn’t have a support system in the first place, which tells me that as far as she’s concerned, you’re an _enemy_ as much as anyone else.”

Kakashi drags a hand through his hair and lets out a sigh. “If she won’t tell me, how do I keep her safe?”

Anko levels him with a very unimpressed look. “You’re a ninja. You’re _her senior officer._ What do you think you should do?”

“….I’m not going to track my own student.”

“Ugh, fine, if you’re going to make things difficult…. Take them on a mission outside the village, then. Keep an eye on her there. Spring it on her so she hasn’t got time to tell someone, if it’s someone else hurting her, and then see how she handles being away from the village. Use your fucking head, Kakashi, and pull rank if you need to.”

He can’t argue. He’s desperate enough for any solution that he can’t turn this one down, even when remembering just how bad their last c-rank mission turned out. Still, something she said was sticking to him…

“If it’s someone else?” He presses, and she looks up the sky.

“You’re not the first sensei to come to me for advice about this shit, and yeah. Sometimes it’s a manipulative bastard who gets his dick ripped off. Sometimes it’s a bitch who gets gutted. But sometimes, man, it’s not half as easy as that shit. You’ve seen what some nin get like after the war- you really think that’s a timebomb that can’t get set off early?”

They finish the walk in silence, leaving Kakashi to consider exactly how many different answers there are to his question, and how few of them are reassuring.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Anko's doing her best, guys. it must suck to have so many jounin-sensei approach her for advice on this stuff because it just means that the system isn't getting any better. She doesn't mention it to kakashi for obvious reasons, but she's also gutted a sensei when of their kids came to Anko, which makes her twice as on edge when a sensei comes to her for advice because part of her is always worried it's a preemptive cover up. 
> 
> What I'm saying is that she's definitely going to be doing a check-in with Kakashi's students, regardless of how much she personally trusts the guy, because Anko is secretly ACTUALLY a responsible adult in rare instances, so expect more Anko in the future! 
> 
> fuck orichimaru


	12. pull back the curtain

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> team seven does not like shish kabobs

Sakura can feel every nerve in her body when she spots Kakashi waiting at the team meetup spot _on time._ She’s never seen him this punctual before, and it’s setting off warning bells in her head. Did someone die? Was there an invasion? How likely is it that the entire village is on fire and she’s the only one who hasn’t noticed.

The boys are walking alongside her and thankfully tense up just as much as she does at the sight. Kakashi gives them a doting smile from a distance, presumably sensing exactly what they’re thinking, and says,

“Hello my cute little genins! We’ve got a mission outside of the village today. Let’s go get your supplies, nah?”

“You’re gonna help us pack, Sensei?” Sakura questions, because that seems a bit odd.

“Consider it an inspection of your mission preparation abilities.” Kakashi offers, which presumably is a nice way of letting them know that he doesn’t trust them to pack the right supplies.

Despite their unease over Kakashi’s early arrival and the unexpectedness of the mission, Sasuke and Naruto seem rather excited about the whole thing. Naruto is squabbling over if he can pack ramen as his portion of the mission food with Kakashi, and Sasuke is tensing himself up in the way that he does before a good fight. Sakura considers, distantly, that she might be the only one who remembers their last out-of-the-village mission. _Or maybe I’m the only one affected by it._ It’s a ridiculous thought, and she shakes it off. Her teammates had nearly died last time, so if they can shake it off, she can too.

Sasuke’s house is first, and none of them- not even Naruto- comment on just how empty and dusty the place is. He grabs a supply of protein bars from a cabinet overflowing with them, a change of clothes ( _Thank god he’s getting some standard of cleanliness,_ sakura thinks desperately) and enough kunai to supply a small army. Kakashi makes him take some medical supplies and some travel gear, but for the most part Sasuke seems to pass muster.

  Naruto is a different story- his apartment is a disasterzone, with overflowing garbagecans and a mostly-empty fridge. Sakura barely controls the impulse to mother-hen him, which is a fight she loses twice during the visit. The first time is when she sees the state of his bedroom- “Naruto, you can’t have moldy food on your _bed,_ are you kidding me?”- and the second is when he grabs a set of rusty Kunai. Thankfully, Kakashi and Sasuke are equally strict when it comes to equipment repair, so she’s not the only one who gives him an earful over it.

 Her house is last, and fastest. She’s kept an emergency pack under her bed ever since the Chuunin Exams, having remembered instructions for in-case-of-invasion scenarios that the civilians got every year. She had added weapons to the list, but beyond that, the kit was essentially identical what was recommended, and she got the Kakashi equivalent of a gold star for her level of preparation. She left a note for her parents on the fridge, just in case they got back from their business trip while she was still gone. If they did, she’d certainly get told off for it, but she doubted they’d be back for another month.

With that, they were leaving the village, Konoha a distant dot behind them far sooner than Sakura would’ve liked.

 Naruto offers to carry her pack for her, and Sasuke thwaps him on the head for her. This sets off an argument that lasts all the way until they reach the edge of the forest greenery that detonates Konoha Territory, at which point Sakura carefully shifts things into a discussion over Suna survival tips. If there’s one thing the boys love, it’s a competition, and so they focus their energies on besting each other in Suna knowledge- neither of them being experts on the subject, this spins out of control quickly, but Sakura’s too pleased by the approving nod Kakashi sends her way when she managed to change the argument into something more like friendly banter to mind.

“Ah, ah, there’s water in the cactuses that you can drink!” Naruto exclaims.

“It’s Cacti, not cactuses, dumbass.” Sasuke corrects, and Naruto pouts.

“Actually, it’s not safe to drink most water from a cactus- it’s a myth started because Suna nin on patrols would carve out and store water in some of them, but natural cactus water is poisonous.” Sakura corrects, and now both boys are pouting at her. Not her fault that they didn’t pay attention to Iruka’s lessons on other nations, so she shrugs it off and says, “Any suggestions for what’s edible around here?”

The fight over if horn-tailed lizards are edible or not lasts until they set up camp, at which point Kakashi skewers a skittering horn-tailed lizard and overs the stick to Sasuke. Sasuke, having been pro lizard-eating mere seconds ago, quickly changes his mind. Kakashi shrugs and sets about cooking it for himself, which starts a new debate over if Kakashi being willing to eat something counts as it being edible or not.

“Maa, they’re considered a delicacy in Suna, silly genin, so long as you catch them before their defenses kick up.”

The boys turn wary eyes towards their sensei and Sakura sets about setting up a tarp for them all to sleep under in the meantime. If they want to buy into Kakashi’s dumb pranks, she’s not going to interfere.

“defenses?” Sasuke asks.

“Ah, yes, they have poisonous tongues and can shoot blood out of their eyes.” Kakashi dutifully describes, eye twinkling with humor.

“No way!” Naruto says, frantically checking the campsite for another lizard and sighing in relief when he doesn’t spot any.

“They also-“ Kakashi begins, but cuts off instantly, holding  up his hand in the basic symbol for _silence._

Sakura and Sasuke shift into defensive positions, and Naruto follows suit as soon as he spots their movements.

 _Suna?_ Sakura signs, and Kakashi shakes his head.

 _Bandits._ He signs back, and Sasuke lights up. They’re not allowed to fight enemy nin, but bandits? Bandits fall within C-rank missions, definitely. If there was a ninja sign for _please,_ he’d probably be making it. Instead he’s signing, _Fight_ with all the intensity he can muster, and Kakashi tilts his head.

_How many?_

Sasuke turns his head in the direction Kakashi is pointing, and activates his sharingan. It’s good practice using it, and shouldn’t be too straining for such a short task. _Five._

Kakashi, ever the doting jounin-sensei, nods. _Fight._ He signs back, and Sasuke is already running.

“I was hoping you’d stratetegize together, but I suppose him holding off for the command was as much of a miracle we’d get this mission. Alright, then, off we go kiddos.”

Naruto whoops and runs after his teammate, and Sakura shakily grabs a kunai from her back and takes after them. She’s not going to hold back just because she’s terrified- her teammates might need her! This is her job! _Don’t hesitate, just go!_

By the time she and Naruto arrive, Sasuke has incapacitated one of the bandits and is locked in a fist-fight with another. Kakashi is fighting another two with his sword, the pair of them wielding the hefty sort of blades that get sold to civilian but would never get used to by an experienced nin. He’s doing fine and clearly keeping an eye on Sasuke’s fight, so Sakura doubts this is more than a bit of exercise for him. Naruto leaps at the last man, a rugged looking giant who was making his way towards where Sasuke’s fistfight is devolving into something more brutal. The man staggers under Naruto’s attack, and it’s obvious for all his size he doesn’t have much pain tolerance- Naruto’s popping up a pair of clones to help out and they’ve managed to stop the man in his tracks as he struggles to shake them off.

 And, yet, again, Sakura is left standing to the side. Sasuke would hate her if she interfered with his fight, and if she tried to help Kakashi she’d just cause more problems. Naruto is nearly done with his fight, so all that’s left for her is to keep watch. _Useless._

She hears a noise from behind her, whips around quickly, and spots the man. The nin.

A defector, certainly, probably a Chuunin if that when he dropped out, definitely doesn’t look like a Jounin rank, and he’s got a blade almost as big as Zabuza’s. He’s moving quick, towards Kakashi, _smart enough to assess the greatest threat,_ and Sakura’s on guard. It was the position she was afforded and she’ll be damned if she doesn’t do it, even if this man is higher ranked than her, stronger and bigger and he’s got a sword that reminds her of the one in her nightmares.

She chucks her Kunai at him and he dodges a few, but two land deep in his left shoulder and he winces. His focus changes to her, presumably intending to make quick work of the nuisance before returning to his target, and Sakura can tell the boys behind her have finally noticed the sixth man’s arrival and are tensing up, but they’re all caught up in their respective fights already and _she can do this, they have to believe she can do this, please! Please don’t interfere!_

She’s dodging his sword well enough for the first few swings, jumping and sliding in the sand, but she quickly realizes that she’s not going to win this with standard tactics. Maybe if she had some poison in her kit, she’d be able to beat him with her limited Kunai skills, but she didn’t have any prepared. Her taijutsu was clearly useless against his bladed attack, and the idea of using ninjutsu or genjutsu was laughable. If she kept it up like this she’d end up cut in half, and for all her practice, she doesn’t think she can handle that level of healing yet. Maybe one day, but right now? Definitely not.

So instead, she waits for just the right thrust of his blade, even as she’s keeping an eye out for another option. She realizes she’s slowing down too much just as it comes, and she allows herself to be skewered.

_Perfectly._

It’s the perfect angle, below the ribs and at just enough of an angle to miss her spine, cutting through her upper intestines but that’s _nothing_ compared to what he could’ve done. She probably wouldn’t even need to do her chakra sealing (though she does, because Sakura is nothing if not cautious) to stay awake, and she pulls herself along the blade to get to the man while he’s in shock that she’s moving so easily, and she has to drag a little bit with her fingers clinging to the edge of the blade and they’re bleeding from the pressure but it’s fine, _she’s fine_ , and she slits the man’s throat while meeting his eyes. It’s not her first kill, but it still makes her feel a little sick.

Some of the blood splashes across her face, soaks into her hair, and she distantly thinks about how hard it will be to wash off in the desert. The sword starts to fall as the man’s body slips back, and she grabs the hilt of it because she doesn’t particularly want to deal with the damage it’s tilted path would do to her body.

 _I won!_ She thinks, pleased, before realizing that the noises of the fight behind her have stopped. She wants to turn around, and finds herself snorting at the image she would present, sword swinging wildly with the turn of her body, and instead she waits for them to come to her.  

They do, appearing before her and next to her respectively in a rush. They’ve clearly all won their fights, Sasuke the bloodiest of them- besides her, she realizes- but none disastrously hurt. Naruto is bruised  and cut but the injuries are already healing, nothing he won’t recover from in a few hours. They’re also staring at her, wide eyes and hands reaching out but afraid to touch, and she’s a little at loss for what might be the cause of it before she looks down and remembers. She looks back at them, trying to giving them the gentlest smile she has, and says,

“Oh, I- don’t worry, I’ve had worse!”

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> kakashi is fucking with them, horned lizards aren't tasty but they also aren't poisonous (and desert horned lizards don't shoot blood out of their eyes, but other lizards do!) (not kidding)
> 
> I might try and rewrite this and add more details and stuff later, but i've been struggling with the expectations i know most of y'all must have with The Reveal Chapter and it's been a long time coming, so i figured it's best if i just put it out there and come back later when it's less stressful for me. 
> 
> Next up: team seven has a collective heart attack, except Sakura who's having a pretty good time and makes a new friend, and technically they still have that mission to handle so that happens. Also, Sakura's mental place? still not great! sorry gang, no quick fix for our girl :(


	13. Troublesome Talks

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> MY COMPUTER CRASHED WHEN I HAD FINALLY ALMOST FINISHED THIS CHAPTER SO I HAD TO RESTART IT ALL OVER AGAIN GODDAMMIT   
> anyways, team seven is forced to Communicate.

Priorities.

She can worry about why everyone is freaking out so much later, right now she has to handle preventing even more damage to her system.

“Naruto! Grab this sword handle and hold it in place.” She barks out, imitating how Ino talks to her teammates as best she can. Naruto dashes over and does as she says, and she slides herself backwards carefully.

“Wait!“ Kakashi says, just as she finishes pulling off, and he’s there to catch her except she’s not falling over.

She shoots him a rueful glance. “Really, Sensei, I told you I’m fine.” She says, even if she leans back a bit on his hands because admittedly she is pretty worn out.

It’s true. There’s blood, and her clothes are torn, but- no cut, no scar. No sign of injury. Perfectly healed. It makes no sense.  

“How-“ Kakashi begins, and then cuts off. What does he even begin to ask?

Naruto pumps his fist in the air, letting out a whoop. “Alright, Sakura-chan! That’s so cool!” He goes closer to stare and prod at her healed stomach, and she gives him a little slap for staring, so he picks her up in a too-tight hug instead and she lets him. “You had me so worried!” He tells her, and she blushes and ruffles his hair and looks away.

Like it’s normal. Like she’s normal. Like she didn’t just have a sword skewering her and she’s not covered in the blood of a man she killed.  To think he thought Sakura would be the _easy_ one on the team to care for.

God, where to begin.

He moves to start pressing questions, and Sakura must see something in his expression, because she announces, “I think I need to sleep, guys.”

“Ah, but Sakura-chan-“

“Tomorrow, Sensei?” She begs, and he can’t say no because he doesn’t want to have this conversation either.

She goes to bed still covered in dried blood, and wakes up four hours later with a hand pressed to her stomach. She jerks back, grabbing for her kunai as the contact registers, but Sasuke is already backing out the tent.

She chases him down to where he had been sitting watch, and he won’t look at her.

“Five.” He mutters, and she sits down next to him carefully. “I said there were only five.”

“Oh, Sasuke-kun…” Sakura begins, reaching out to grab his hand and more than a little surprised when he doesn’t pull away. “I’d have to fight eventually, you know. I’m your teammate, not a client.”

He finally looks at her, angry. “you got _stabbed._ ”

That’s what this was about? “Oh, but Sasuke-kun, that’s not your fault!”

She could try and explain the risks of battle, the fact it was bound to happen eventually, but those are all thing someone else could offer. She can give him the truth.

“I _chose_ to get stabbed, see?” She tells him, excitedly, taking her hand back so she can point at the spot. “Upper intestines only, no spinal fracture- it was the easiest way for me to k- kill him-“ because she still hesistates at that particular thought, “-without getting permenant damage. So it’s not your fault at all!”

“You _what_?”

That was Naruto, his head poking out of the tent, and Kakashi is there too, and apparently they’ve reached tomorrow because she’s stuck explaining things now.

Sasuke refuses to sit near her, and she tries to not take it to heart. She’s placed with the fire to her back and her teammates in front of her so she can’t even run away, which she’s suspecting was Kakashi-sensei’s intent by putting them like this. Clever Sensei.

“It’s not a big deal.” She tries, sheepishly, but it’s no use.

“Maa, Sakura-chan, what have you been doing?”

She takes a deep breath, begins snapping fingers- then pauses as she sees the boys eyes focus on the motion and remembers she’s not supposed to do that when people can see, comforting or not. Fine. Fine. She can do this.

“After the mission in Wave, I just…. wanted to be useful. So I started practicing healing myself. I was gonna try and be the team medic, but… I got too good at healing myself.”

_Since Wave?_

“Hm?” He prompts.

“I got really good at practicing on myself, and- ugh, okay, our bodies are infused with chakra. Some stuff, like top-layer skin, sheds pretty regularly. But the longer something is part of you, the more of your chakra gets infused in it, and I got so good at healing stuff with my _own_ chakra that anything besides a surface scratch on somebody else is- it’s too _different,_ I guess.”

“You said it was an _accident._ ” Sasuke hisses accusingly. “You said- did you do that stuff to yourself, what you did to that woman? Did you practice stopping your own _heart,_ Sakura?”

“Of- of course not! I mean, I had to slow it down sometimes so I wouldn’t bleed out, but I haven’t stopped it yet-“

“Yet?”

This wasn’t going how she wanted it to.

“I just meant I wouldn’t do anything I didn’t think I could handle!”

Couldn’t they understand what she was doing was for their good? They didn’t have to worry about her anymore! She wasn’t holding anyone back! She was finally useful, couldn’t they see that?

“You’re not doing this anymore.” Kakashi-sensei says, finally speaking up from his spot directly across from her.

“What? Kakashi-sensei, you can’t- I _have to-_ “

“You’re not.”

“Fuck you.” She spits out, and while Kakashi doesn’t react, Naruto certainly jerks back at the words. “You want me to _die_ next time, or what? You didn’t want to teach me so I figured out this out on my own and you can’t take this away from me, you can’t, you- you insufferable- I can’t-“

Distantly, she realizes she’s crying. Dammit.

“I know of someone.” Kakashi says, in a way that gets her to shut up because it sounds like he’s conceding. “She’s a medic. She can teach you how to heal. How you’re _supposed to_. After the mission.... after the mission, I’ll take you to her, if you agree to stop…. Practicing, in the meantime.”

_He doesn’t have to know. He didn’t notice before, I can still practice so long as I’m careful and then the medic will understand and it’ll be fine._

“Okay.” She says, to tired to say anything else, and she goes back to bed to pretend to sleep.

 

They make it to Suna’s capital in record time, despite the fact that none of them got any rest, probably because they didn't talk at all taking apart their camp or getting there. They pass on word about the bandits, and set about meeting with their actual obligation. He meets them at the gate, the guards refusing to stand to close. The sun is barely in the sky but they can all feel the heat of the coming sun. There’s no breeze, but she feels grains of sand graze across her arms.

“Hello, Sakura.” Gaara of the sand says, waiting primly for her team to approach, eyes locked on hers. “I put myself in your team’s care.”

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i'm not subtle about who that medic is gonna be, huh?  
> its tough writing team seven as surprised and concerned for someones safety when the threat to their safety is themselves? especially since sakura is normally the Emotionally Competent one which means in this case there's nobody who knows how to TALK ABOUT THINGS   
> also, naruto is used to Super Healing so he's the least freaked out about it


	14. Friends out of Foes

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> heart to hearts with the sandman

Gaara is waiting for her to say something. The rest of her team is waiting for her to say something. Sakura has no idea what to say, so she falls back on ingrained childhood lessons: politeness before all else.

“Hello, Gaara-san! We’re honored to help you on your journey.” She says, bowing as deep as she thinks appropriate to the son of a world leader. It’s probably not deep enough, all things considered, but her stomach is still sore and she’s trying her best.

Kakashi bows as well, shoving the boys heads to match when they prove too slow on the uptake.

“Konoha sends its regards.” Kakashi-sensei adds, but Gaara’s eyes do not waver from their intent focus on Sakura. She shuffles awkwardly, before glancing back at her team for some guidance. “Ah, I think now is as good a time to leave as any.”

Apparently Suna agrees with Kakashi’s sentiment, because the group begins their march out almost immediately.

 Gaara is heading towards Rain, to meet with a fuinjutsu master to deal with a matter that team seven is obviously not allowed to know the details of. As a sign of trust, they’d requested a Konoha team to assist in the transport- though Sakura suspects it’s more show than anything, considering that Gaara could easily destroy any of them if past experience is anything to go off of.

Still. She feels bad, about their match- there’s a sense of shame from defeating a vastly superior opponent with an underhanded trick like hers, as clever as it was, and she didn’t like the guilt that was clinging to her as she ran through the desert under the whip of the harsh desert breeze.

Naruto and Sasuke take at least twenty minutes longer to start squabbling, but it’s an inevitable fact that they must eventually find something to fight about.  In this case, it’s about who’s better at manipulating chakra to turn the sand into a steady landing spot for their feet and waste less energy running, an exercise Kakashi-sensei prompted them to take up their first day in the desert. Naruto is terrible at it, but doesn’t seem to notice because he’s got so much energy to spare it doesn’t effect him at all; Sasuke is slightly better, but puts too much energy into the exercise itself and ends up just as worn out for it.

“Successfully mastering the process is obviously more important than not being effected by messing it up, dumbass.” Sasuke says, and Naruto sticks his tongue out him.

“you’re just saying that ‘cause you’re embarrassed you’re not as strong as me!”

Gaara and Sakura are at the front of the group, and he turns to look at the bickering pair before turning his attention back forward.

“Why not stop them?” He asks, and it takes her a moment to realize he’s talking to her.

“Oh, they’re always like that.” She replies, but he doesn’t seem to get it.

“Is there an advantage to letting them talk so incessantly?” He presses, and she snorts.

“If there is, we haven’t found it yet, Gaara-san.”

“Then why allow it?”

She remembers, suddenly, how quietly terrified his own team had been during the chuunin exams. Obedient to a fault, silent as possible.  She supposes Suna must treat their teams very differently, so she tries to figure out how to properly explain it.

“I could yell at them to shut up, sure, and when it gets really annoying I do. Kakashi-sensei could definitely get them to stop if he wanted to put the effort in. But then they’d be moody and upset and not feel like an equal part of the team, so unless it’s important, it’s better to just leave them be.”

“This is important? Their moods?”

“It’s important for everyone in the team to feel valued, I think.” She says, remembering how often she felt left out and how that pushed her away from contributing at all. Now that she’s got some confidence in herself, she can contribute regardless, but that didn’t change how hard it was to feel like her ideas where worth it sometimes.

“Hm.” Gaara says, and then glances back at the pair again. “I’ll respect your opinion, then, and not kill them.”

She gives a poor attempt of a laugh at what she hopes is a poor attempt at a joke, and they spend the rest of the day in silence.

They set up camp at Gaara’s direction, in a well-sheltered spot protected from the cold night winds and the chance of a dune collapse. They work efficiently, with chores accepted with little complaint for once, and there’s a campfire and food within the hour.

This is when Sakura picks up on the fact that she’s not alone.

It’s not like privacy is common on their missions- cramped quarters is a defining aspect of them. But she’s used to being able to go for a walk or take a bathroom break without someone hovering nearby, paying attention to what she’s doing with more focus than she’d like.

Sasuke patrols when she takes her walk. Naruto is faux-napping when she goes into the tent to inspect her supplies. Kakashi is reading his book when she sits by the fire. Gaara’s watchfulness she can excuse as an interested outsider, but her boys are driving her a little crazy.

“Enough already! I told you I wouldn’t practice, didn’t I?” She prompts, glaring at her sensei across the fire. Gaara seems eager to watch the confrontation unfold, eating his meal without glancing at the bowl.

“Maa, Sakura, I have no idea what you’re talking about.” Kakashi replies, gaze sliding towards Gaara and then back at her.

“Well, if that’s the case, then I’m sure you won’t mind if me and Gaara-san go for a walk _without_ a million supervisors. Unless you think I’ll break a leg in front of our guest?”

Kakashi rolls his eyes, but doesn’t stop her from standing up in a huff and dragging Gaara and his bowl of rice with them. (She distantly notices that not a single grain of sand has ended up mixed in with his rice, and she considers asking if he can pull that trick with her food too. She’s a little sick of the gritty taste of sand mixing with everything she eats.)

He goes willingly, if slowly, and waits for a very short time before her angry pace slows down and her arms stop swinging so much.

“Sorry for dragging you into that, Gaara-san, I’m just a little- frustrated.” She says. He nods awkwardly.

“They don’t trust you.” He says, and it’s barely a question.

She doesn’t know how to explain what she doesn’t understand herself- does her team pity her? Do they not care if she survives, or do they care too much about her methods? They don’t seem this watchful of each other, and she’s certainly not the only one with unusual training habits, so they must feel _something_ different about her.

“They don’t.” She agrees, because it’s true. They don’t trust her skills to let her practice, and they don’t trust her word that she won’t practice anyways. (That second thing they’re right about, but still…. It rankles.)

“My people do not trust me either.” He tells her.

“But you’re so strong!” She says, and turns a bit pink at the words that slipped out so easily. What she would give to be as obviously skilled as him!

“I am.” He agrees, and she notices he hasn’t blinked their entire conversation, but it’s not the weirdest habit a teammate has had so she shoves it to the back of her mind. For the first time in ages, she feels like someone- even a weird, kind of scary someone- understands her and doesn’t hate her for it.

“I just want to prove to them I’m a worthy team member.” She admits, staring at her hands and considering the blood she’s already spilled for Konoha with them. Two deaths, now, and they still don’t seem to have faith in her abilities. “But if your team doesn’t think you’re worthy, as powerful as you are, maybe it’s a useless thing for me to even try.”

The conversation seems to have met its end, and when she breaks and remolds her bones in the dark, Gaara says nothing. She likes to think it’s acceptance, even if it’s not understanding, and when they go back to the fire she finds there’s no sand in her food, even though she never remembered to ask him for the favor.

 It’s actually worth Kakashi’s teasing prompts about _her boyfriend_ and Naruto’s indignant sputtering, despite what her frantic reassurance may make it seem. It’s nice to have a friend.

 

Things go surprisingly well that first night, so of course it all has to go to shit in the morning, or they wouldn’t be team seven.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> lmao apparently sakura fans and gaara fans are a venn diagram that's just a circle. y'all are cute, i'm glad you're excited to have Gaara returning ! 
> 
> coming up: a fight scene! Sakura starts to go into withdrawal, but Dumb Decisions and weird new friend comes to the rescue! kakashi hates every decision hes ever made thats brought him to this point !


	15. Heartbreaker Haruno

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> large fight scenes are very difficult to write, Sakura continues to make bad decisions, gaara is supportive.

 

They wake up to harsh winds and bitter men approaching the camp.

It’s obvious the men are from Rain, distinctive rebreathers on most of them preventing sand from getting into their lungs if the insignia on their headbands didn’t give it away. It’s enough of them to technically count as a small army, and things grow vastly more difficult as they draw nearer because Gaara is dragging her aside to tell her something that must be important.

“I’m finding a Fujutsu master to repair my seal because my control has been growing unstable.” He tells her, mouth barely moving over the words to prevent her teammates eager focus from being able to lip-read.  She has no idea what he needs sealed, or why, but he’d only be saying this for one reason.

“You can’t fight.” Sakura says, shocked. “Why would they let you leave with a genin team if you couldn’t fight?“

“My decision is not supported by my village.” He says, which is easy enough to reason out. They’re _hoping_ he’ll  be forced to fight, perhaps destroy this seal and undo whatever it is he’s been working on.

“Fine.” She says, jutting her chin out more confidently then she feels. “Then we’ll just make sure you don’t have to fight.”

Her teammates clearly managed to hear that part of their conversation, because they’re looking at her like she’s crazy, but Gaara just stares at her in that odd way that makes her think he believes her. It’s enough to strengthen her resolve, and she turns to Kakashi and prods, “What’s the plan, Sensei?”

“Ah. Well, this is as good a time as any for us to practice strategy, I think. Sasuke, Naruto, ideas?”

The boys snap to attention from where they’d been shooting glares at Gaara, Naruto to stare at Kakashi in utter confusion and Sasuke to study the encroaching enemy forces.

“Naruto’ll need to use his clones to even out our forces.”

“One of us will have to guard no-brows!”

“Good enough.” Kakashi concludes, because the Rain nin were getting far too close for his liking. “I’ll be guarding Gaara-san. Naruto, you heard Sasuke, lots of clones. Sakura, you and Sasuke are a pair, watch eachothers’ backs, got it?”

“Got it!” Sakura says, Sasuke agreeing with a nod.

Kakashi created two sets of duplicates of Gaara and him to add to the confusion, and then finally, _finally,_ the enemy arrived.

Naruto lead the charge, of course, but it wasn’t long before the rest of the team was wrapped up in the battle. Three nin charged for Sakura, sensing a weak link, and Sasuke intercepted two of them. Sakura was half the height of the last one so she focused on consistent lower-body hits, quick jabs instead of the shattering punches a stronger nin could deliver. She managed to place a crippling slice with a kunai on the muscles behind the knee, finished him with another slice to the meat of his thigh, and only took a few cuts to her arm for the trouble.

There were fourteen enemy nin in total, most of them stuck fighting a losing battle with at least twenty Naruto who made up for the skill difference in sheer numbers. Sasuke managed to set one of them on fire, and then he and Sakura found themselves surrounded by four of the ten enemies. Sasuke seemed to be gearing up for something that would almost certainly exhaust his chakra, a dangerous move Sakura had no intent of letting him see through in the desert.  

Thinking quickly, She focused her energy in the palm of her left hand, shoving as much chakra and intent as she can into the thing as she kept a defensive crouch and a protective right-handed Kunai at the ready. It was a matter of seconds, despite feeling like minutes, before she had a finished heart. Sasuke was at her back, thank goodness, facing away, but there was a moment when the entirety of their opponents’ focus was on her hand and she _shot_ the thing with as much chakra as she could manage and it burst, blinding the two nin closest to her with blood and bits of flesh, and she dived for them when they stumbled back.  She manages to slice the throat of the first in the confusion, but the second is more prepared and they tumble in the sand for a frightening few moments before he manages to brace her arms down. She knees him hard in the gut, knocks his leg to the side, forcing him to collapse his full weight on top of her and her kunai. It tears into his gut and it’s with some effort she manages to get him, and a small amount of his organs, rolled off of her.

When Sakura gets back up, there aren’t any enemies left to fight.

Gaara is a twitching mess, muttering to himself and wrapped in a rope of sand, but unbloodied. Kakashi likely hadn’t wanted to leave so much up to chance, but risking the life of the Kazakage’s grandson and potential heir by leaving him in the charge of someone less skilled than a jounin could’ve caused a diplomatic incident even Kakashi-sensei couldn’t walk off.

So Sakura is sure to announce, as loud as she can, “Oh good, we’re all okay!” For the sake of the two most experienced members of their band. No need to add to Kakashi’s guilt, and the reminder that the fight is over with seems to help Gaara calm down. She might not understand his compulsions, but she’s been struggling with her own these past few days rather immensely. She can’t imagine restraining herself as successfully as Gaara has been, by all appearances.  

\--

“You regrow.” Gaara prompts, later that night when they’re on another of their walks. “They don’t want you to?”

“I have to practice to get better at it, but they won’t let me.” She scratches at her arms at the thought, enough to leave red lines but it’s not enough compared to what she’s used to. Not even close.

“You miss it.”

“I need it.” She corrects, honestly as she can, because if anyone can understand it has to be him. The others- the others don’t get it, but he seems to. She might not need it the way you need air or water or food, but she cannot imagine her life without the sting of it. It’s starting to consume her thoughts, spattering her dreams with the kind of blood she wants in her waking hours. She’s used to the adrenaline rush of the danger, and she can’t stop craving it now that it’s gone.

Gaara gestures discretely towards one of the rare spatterings of green in the desert. It’s a sweet looking shrub, all things considered, with spiked leaves and pink blossoms.  She’d been admiring it earlier, when they first set up camp, but had given up talking about it when Sasuke and Naruto both proved unmoved by the inherent wonder in desert flora.

“those are poisonous.” He says, and she catches the undercurrent of his words. “Be careful.”

He doesn’t say anything when she plucks a few, slips them in her bag. Doesn’t say anything when they make it back to camp and she looks pale and whoozy as they eat their dinner, as she ducks out of another group argument to head to bed early.

Learning how to cure poisons is an essential extension to any med nin’s skills, really. _You could say I’m just getting a headstart,_ Sakura reassures herself. The hallucinations that come with it are distracting and terrible in new ways for her, but a challenge is nothing to back away from and it’s not as if her crush doesn’t intend to eventually fight a man who specializes in causing horrifying hallucinations. Really, it’s for the better of everyone if she manages this sooner rather than later.

And if the intense, brutal pain of a failing organ, of nausea and her erratic heart, if all of that is enough to finally calm her cravings? All the better for it, she decides.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> she weaponized it, gross. was originally gonna have her shove the heart into the grate of one of the enemy's rebreathers, but then decided it worked better as a large scale distraction as opposed to a potential suffocation tool(?). guts before gorey, badum shh. 
> 
> Also! the plant she's using is technically poisonous in it's entirety- the leaves, flowers, bark, roots- and to my immense confusion, the website i was researching it on made sure to mention that tea made from it was ALSO poisonous. like, who finds out a plant is so poisonous the entire thing could kill ya....and then tries to make a tea out of it. then i remembered that nettle soup is a thing so i guess humans are just Like That, y'all.


	16. Inner Kakashi (CHA!)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> the plot moves along and we get a peak into Kakashi's head.

Kakashi has no idea if this is a side-effect of her going off her routine self-mutilation, or a symptom of a desert fever, but there’s something wrong with Sakura. As in, something _else_ wrong with her, as opposed to just the fact that she routinely butchers herself for fun. Kakashi will never understand children, and is relieved he never was one.

Sakura’s pale and sickly, and if the boys’ didn’t box her in, she’d veer offcourse on their runs. She’s more amicable than any of them are used to, allowing their squabbles to last much longer than she usually would. Naruto even claims he caught her _humming,_ off key and out of sync, while she was in charge of cooking dinner.

Normally, he’d assume she’s sick, but he’s not entirely sure she _can_ get sick, if her claims are true. He doesn’t really get what she does to fix herself, but he doubts it’s as simple as it seems, and if she understands the complexities in cellular regeneration, he wouldn’t be surprised if she can purge her body of invading bacteria too.

He desperately needs to get this mission done, so he can get rid of the weird kid who’d be a much bigger threat if he didn’t seem infatuated/terrified of Sakura, and he can drag his team of morons to Tsunade and get some goddamn answers. Maybe he should try a lower level medic first, but honestly, Kakashi doubts anyone but Tsunade herself will be able to tell what Sakura’s been doing to herself.

God, how is he going to explain this to Anko when he gets back? _No worries, she’s not getting abused, she’s just been tearing herself apart for funsies? If I’d agreed to teach her sooner she’d probably just be throwing herself a little too hard into training but instead I accidentally pushed her onto the path of self-destruction that normally takes at least a few years of ANBU service for a nin to reach?_

It’s not a conversation he’s looking forward too, but something tells him if he doesn’t keep Anko updated he’ll wake up dead one day soon- or, even worse, missing his Icha Icha.

If there’s one sliver of an upside to this situation, it’s that the boys seem to be throwing themselves into their role as teammates at last. They’re still fighting like a couple of toddlers, but they’re not insulting eachother nearly as much, and they’re careful to keep an eye on Sakura. Sasuke even volunteered to carry her pack for her- played it off as adding to his strength training, and didn’t argue when she refused, but still. It’s not the kind of offer an Uchiha has ever made before, sickly teammate or not, and Kakashi would’ve cried if it wouldn’t waste precious water on a desert mission.

The Gaara kid keeps to himself, for the most part, which is more than Kakashi could ask for all things considered. He takes orders from Sakura, not Kakashi, which would probably be insulting if it didn’t fit the team dynamic as it stands. The boys might never have respected Sakura as an equal, but when it came to listening to someone, Sakura was a master at controlling her audience- a fist for Naruto and a simpering beg for Sasuke and things would go fine. Kakashi hadn’t felt like trying to change the dynamic when it was just the four of them, so perhaps having the Kazekage’s son kowtow to his inferior and shoot him disapproving glances inbetween was his penance.

The worst of it is when the boy forces himself into their discussions of Sakura’s habits, now that they can leave her alone to try and come up with a plan. She’s too busy fitfully sleeping off whatever illness she’s been hit with to try anything, after all.

Naruto keeps pushing for them to talk it out with her. He figures if they figure out the emotions motivating her decisions, they can help resolve them and give her a healthier outlook. It’s a mature, reasonable conclusion to come to, and a sign of a certain kind of wisdom that Naruto would suggest it.

There’s no way in hell they’re doing that.

Kakashi already _tried_ talking to her, back when he thought she was being abused, and it hadn’t worked at all. None of them were particularly good at talking, so his vote was that they would ignore it until they got her to a professional- Tsunade- who could handle all the talking and the fixing for them. They’d just have to go along with whatever plan their superior came up with, and it would probably do just fine in fixing her up.

Sasuke seemed to be the middle ground between them, and what a bizarre situation they were in that Sasuke was the calmest of the group. He felt obligated to do something, but talking things out was as off the table for him as it was for Kakashi, which meant their arguments would never end.

Then, there’s the aforementioned Gaara. He normally- thank gods- stayed out of it, preferring to create shapes in the sand and contemplate the moon or whatever bullshit all his non-blinking at the sky was supposed to be. When he did weigh in, it was the same thing every time-

“What’s wrong with what Sakura-chan is doing?”

It’s a great question, if you have no morals or understanding of physical pain, which apparently at least one of those things the boy is lacking. For the rest of them, it’s infuriating.

“It’s hurting her!” Naruto would point out, and Gaara would shrug and reply, “Most trying is supposed to hurt.”

“It could cause permanent damage.” Sasuke would reason, and Gaara would pause before asking, 

“Does the risk outweigh the benefit?”

Kakashi wouldn’t say anything, because he’s pretty sure cursing out the kazekage’s kid is a great way to get yourself on the wrong side of a war. Or, considering how chummy the boy and Sakura have been, the wrong side of _Sakura,_ which is way worse.

Sakura would wake up in the morning to a friendly Gaara offering her a sand-free breakfast that would be gentle on her constantly-queasy stomach, with pretty pink flowers in her cup of water- and to her teammates staring daggers at him, for reasons they refused to explain to her but insisted where very important.

One day, desperately, Naruto tugged Sasuke over and gestured towards his face and wailed, “Sakura, what about this bastard, huh? You’re not going to ignore him for the sake of no-brows, are you?”

Kakashi had barely contained his laugh, and Sakura had turned bright red and refused to talk to _anyone_ for the rest of the day. It was a nice reminder that his genin were still, actually, children.

Finally, _finally,_ when the nights are starting to creep up on him with an anxious rush, because Sakura is not getting better and the desert is a dangerous place for an invalid, they reach the capital of Rain that houses both the sealing masters that Gaara seeks, and Tsunade-Sama’s lastest gambling den stakeout.

They part ways amicably, all things considered. Gaara tells Sakura he now understands why she doesn’t ‘simply murder the boys and be done with it’, and she is not so ill that she doesn’t force him into an awkward hug before he leaves. Naruto is more than happy to announce his joy at the departure, and while Sasuke is more polite, Kakashi still spots a relieved smile dart across the boy’s face for a moment.

He instructs his genin to stay close and to keep an eye out for a busty blonde. Sasuke drawls, “Mission or pleasure?”, and then Kakashi has to put up with three giggling children, one of whom refuses to stop laughing, one who looks like she doesn’t have the breath to spare for the laughs but is using it up anyways, and one looking far too smug with his accomplishments.

He settles with slapping the boy on the head and trying to hide his matching snort at the line.

It’s Naruto who finds her first, because of course it had to be the one with the least tact. He calls out, “Hey, there’s busty over there!”, loud enough for the entire row of gamblers at slot machines to turn and take a look at the group.

This is how Kakashi is reintroduced to Tsunade-sama, the Slug Princess, legendary medic and frontline fighter. Last time he saw her, he was a bratty seven year old with no morals and no sense of humor. He’s not sure which version of him he’d like her to focus on right now.

“Alright, dumbasses, what do you want?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> thank you so much for all the kind comments, they've been really motivating! I really appreciate the offers to beta and the spellchecks in the comments too, I'll be going through them and making fixes (& contacting a beta!) soon as i can.
> 
> Work is getting busy for me right now so my updates will be slower, but I'm really excited to bring Tsunade in and i've got some Plans (tm) for the gang when they return to Konoha- soon!- i'm really pumped to write. to be honest i'm struggling with time right now in general, or else i'd be replying to comments much faster & making the aforementioned spellcheck type changes sooner. I feel bad, but with the time i've got right now it really feels like a choice between updating or editting old chapters and that y'all would prefer the former. 
> 
> long angsty yelling in end notes over! promise next chapter delivers some of that DIVINE INTERVENTION y'all have been craving, because tsunade yelling is absolutely divine intervention and it's about time someone who understands medical jutsu finds out what sakura's been doing.


	17. Two Steps Forward...

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It's a medic-nin party, featuring a Mom (TM), an alcholic aunt (tm), and a maschostic baby. also the boys are there and being very polite, all things considered.

“Kakashi… care to tell me why the  _ hell  _ this little girl looks like she just escaped the frontlines of the first shinobi war?”

“Elaborate.” He suggests, because she’s confirming his worst fears and he’d prefer to get new answers instead.

Tsunade gives him a scathing look, before gesturing professionally—surprisingly so, considering just how drunk the woman is—towards Sakura’s arm.

“Forty-seven healed fractures. A hundred and two healed breaks. Distortions in skin cells imply at least thirty healed clean cuts, fifty healed abrasions, and at least one instance of burned flesh, probably a level two with how deep it marks her muscles. That’s just her left arm, so unless Konoha is enlisting child soldiers in frontline efforts yet again and she’s been serving since she was  _ two,  _ I’m going to need some answers.”

Kakashi has no idea what to say, but Sakura is practically glowing with excitement. Her eyes are wide, her skin is flushed, and her hands are clasped together in awe.

“That’s amazing! How could you tell? How difficult is it to see that? Can you teach me?”

The rush of words hits Tsunade full force and seems to send her reeling back for a few seconds, before the content registers and she gives the girl a suspicious look.

“It’s a common skill for medic nin, which you  _ should  _ be used to by now considering you must be conjoined fucking twins with a talented one to still be alive.” Her gaze shifts to inspect Sakura’s companions, and her doubts about the newest Team Seven are obvious. “…. Are you missing a member, or is the carrot smarter than he looks?”

“Hey, not cool, granny!” Naruto yelled, before quickly having his mouth covered by a wincing Kakashi.

“Actually, Sakura-chan has been healing herself. And injuring herself. Which is why we’re here to see you.”

“....I’m gonna need another drink.” Tsunade declares, before standing and grabbing the back of Sakura’s shirt to drag the girl after her towards the casino’s bar. The rest of her team scrambles to keep up, and only hear the tail end of the words, “ _ poison in your system, dumbass?” _

Kakashi is growing more relieved every second that Tsunade had chosen to share the details of Sakura’s arm, despite the way her gaze had first held on Sakura’s neck. He thinks he’ll need the rest of the night to prepare himself for  _ that  _ kind of information.

They make it to the bar and as Tsunade takes a long draw from her bottle, a woman with black hair snags it from her and pulls the thing away from her lips.

“We talked about this.” The woman says sternly, and Tsunade waves a wobbly hand at her and replies, “Shizune-chan, I  _ need  _ it. Just take a look at the pink one’s organs!”

The woman—Shizune—turns her attention, if unwillingly, to the child as directed, and then immediately rushes forward to place her hands over Sakura’s stomach. Her hands glow a faint green, just how Sakura used to dream her own hands would, and a weight is lifted from the back of her eyes as the seconds tick by.

“Thank you, Miss, um, Shizune-san.” Sakura says, because she was raised to be exceedingly polite, and Shizune is now pushing Sakura towards Tsunade and putting herself firmly between the girl and Kakashi.

“Why on earth are you taking children—“ at this, Sasuke pouts, but refuses to interrupt— “on a mission that lets one get  _ severe long term poisoning? _ ”

“Oh. I thought I’d fixed it all.” Sakura mutters to herself. Internal organs were much harder than other parts, but she’d hoped her endless exhaustion and nightmares came from the physical stress on her body, not residual poison in her system. She’d have to work on that more carefully in the future.

“She’s supposed to be your team medic? Honestly, Konoha is—is! This is ridiculous! That’s too much responsibility for a child.”

Despite being delighted in getting to see Shizune fuming at someone else’s poor decisions, Tsunade decides she can’t let them get too off track.

“Pinkie’s been doing it to herself, apparently, so don’t tear him a new one just yet.” Tsunade offers up, taking another sip from a beer she’s somehow procured while Shizune’s attention had strayed.

Shizune looks at Sakura. Sakura looks at Shizune. Nobody says anything for a few seconds, and then Shizune releases a horrifyingly deep groan.

“God, it’s another  _ you. _ ” She says.

Sakura decides to take it as a compliment, considering Tsunade  _ is  _ famous and everything.

\--

Shizune forces the lot of them to go to her hotel room, and sets about having a hushed, polite conversation with Sakura while Tsunade babysits the other genin and Kakashi. She was switching between an intriguing story about a specialized enemy jutsu on the battlefield that kept the boys enthralled, and a slightly too racy story passed on from Jiraiya that was keeping Kakashi’s focus, for the most part.

“Sakura-san, you need to stop.” Shizune says, and Sakura can feel her bottom lip wobbling despite herself.

“I won’t try poison for a while again, I promise! I’ve been handling it really well so far and it’s come in handy and—and—I really don’t want to be useless again.”

Shizune places a comforting hand on the girl’s shoulder and gives her the most reassuring smile she could.

“It’s okay, Sakura. You can be—“ She pauses, the word she has to use feeling uncomfortable on her tongue, but necessary for the child before her to understand, “—useful, still, without hurting yourself. You can learn how to fight, can’t you?”

Sakura shakes her head. “Kakashi-sensei refused last time I asked.”

Shizune takes a deep breath and refuses to look over at her new least favorite person, second only to whoever keeps letting Tsunade order more shots.

“I’m pretty sure he’ll have a different answer this time if you ask again… and if he doesn’t, I promise I’ll find you a new sensei.”

The girl brightens at the words, and Shizune decides to push her and asks, “Sakura, you seem very skilled at this… why not become a medic the normal way?”

All progress is lost.

“I  _ can’t.  _ I used to be able to, I think I could’ve learned, anyways, but I screwed it up when I was practicing.”

There were signs of damage to the girl’s system, certainly, but nothing that would interfere with healing others. Her chakra paths were the least injured part of her body, all things considered. 

“What do you mean?”

“I got so used to  _ my  _ chakra molding, whenever I tried to heal someone else their chakra was  _ different  _ and wrong and I couldn’t get it to fit and it  _ hurt. _ ”

Tsunade cuts off her story from across the room and whips her attention to the girl.

“Second me, my  _ ass _ .” She says, but it doesn’t sound like an insult. “Idiot, you’re not broken, you’ve just crazy chakra control. Get used to someone else’s chakra and you’d be able to heal them, too.”

“What?”

Suddenly, Tsunade has an armful of limbs and a mouthful of pink hair. She should’ve closed her mouth, blech.

“Thank you so much, Tsunade-sama!” The girl cries, and Tsunade offers an awkward pat on her back and lets her stay there. “I thought I was gonna be useless again.” The words are muttered, pressed in the soft fabric of Tsunade’s shirt.

“Ah, no biggie, Pinkie.” Tsunade offers sheepishly, trying very hard to not act on instinct and fling the clinging girl out the nearest window from all the contact. It was unusual to actually hold back on her instincts, but in this instance, she doubts she’d ever regret it.

\--

It’s hours later, when the others have fallen asleep—the genin in a pile on one of the beds, Naruto’s legs flung across Sakura’s stomach and Sakura’s arm over Sasuke’s face, Tsunade in her own room—when Shizune pulls Kakashi aside for a discussion.

“She’s going to need to see a doctor.” She says, and tuts when Kakashi gives a judgmental look. “Not a medic nin, a  _ psychologist.  _ I know Konoha isn’t one for prioritizing mental health, but it’s not optional here.”

 

\--

She can do it! Sakura knows, if she just tries hard enough, she can focus her energy on healing others, and not on her ‘practicing’. Of course, the idea of skipping her practice makes her fidget, but she knows it’s for the best. 

 

Still… She can work on her regeneration ideas without testing them, right? Nothing wrong with the idea- messing with her genetics shouldn’t even hurt, and it’s not like anybody will know she’s doing it. And if she gets injured in her spars, it’s not like she injured  _ herself _ —people get hurt in spars all the time! She starts to feel giddy, agitation replaced with a racing heart. She’s gotten pretty good at the basic stuff she can inflict on herself, anyways—she lives in a village filled with much more powerful nin, with all sorts of dangerous jutsu.  _ Just imagine healing a chidori injury—or a rasengan, or a hit directed by byakugan, fire jutsu or— _

Sakura feels a sudden excitement for her future opportunities. Her failures in fights would just be another opportunity to learn. 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> huge kudos to Noter (https://archiveofourown.org/users/Noter/pseuds/Noter) serving as a beta for this! 
> 
> Up next: back to Konoha! return of The Anko! hopefully i can give the boys a mini-adventure as penance for not having them do much in this chapter? and the return of something else entirely.


	18. Healing and Heels

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> return of The Anko, sakura's most well-adjusted buddies, and the boys get up to some nonsense worthy of a filler episode.

Delivery mission complete and additional task finished, Team Seven makes their way back to Konoha rather efficiently.

Technically, Kakashi should report that he dragged his team after a legendary medic because one of his genin has been mutilating herself for funsies, apparently, for months. Instead, he sets about giving as plain and devoid of information a report as possible—after he’s forced into making it in the first place by a particularly motivated desk nin—and trying to figure out where to find a therapist for Sakura. Then, while he’s at it, he figures he should find a therapist for the boys as well, since apparently mental health is about to be important, which means he’s suddenly far busier than he’d prefer and can’t spare the time to actually train his kids for a few days.

Therapists are, after all, a bit of a hot commodity in a village that just barely survived a war and a Kyuubi attack. Finding one for shinobi, and not civilians, is a rarity—he’s got his work cut out for him, to say the least.

The boys take advantage of the break from training to spar, because her teammates insist on being insufferably boring sometimesl, and because Sasuke was never informed that ‘break’ can refer to more than just shattering your opponent’s bones.

Not that Sakura can talk, because she’d have been training right there beside them if a terrifying, beautiful, scary woman from the chuunin exams didn’t appear at their training field and drag her away. It’s only after she’s offered two sticks of dango that Sakura stops fighting the incessant tug, and happily follows alongside the Jounin woman whose very presence is making her blush just a bit.

So maybe Sakura has a thing for strong people with black hair and black eyes. You learn something new about yourself everyday, and also, dango is _delicious,_ she’d love it if we could all just focus on that instead please?

Anko sets about a very efficient version of a familiar conversation.

“Your sensei is Hatake Kakashi, right?”

Sakura nods, mouth full of the sticky-sweet treat she’s been bribed with. If this is a clever attempt at learning secrets to defeating the copy nin, Sakura is happy to oblige—this is the best dango she’s ever had, and Anko is much prettier than Kakashi.

“He’s not fucking you, right?”

She swallows the dango in shock because she’s not about to spit it out and waste it.

“No!”

“Cool. Is someone else fucking you?”

Sakura frantically shakes her head. Is there some sort of signal she gives off that’s making everyone think that? Anko halts their walking, giving Sakura her full attention and gesturing at the girl with her own now-clean stick.

“You know I can beat people up really good, right? I’m a jounin. And I have people who owe me favors—” the way she says favors sounds more like blackmail, “—so if you’re worried about getting hurt for saying something…”

_That’s the sort of smile you have to practice to make so intimidating._

“I promise, no one’s hurting me.” Sakura says, and then, because it’s a bit dizzying to bear the brunt of Anko’s focus, and she feels like she owes the woman for trying, “If it’s about my scars and stuff, it’s—I did it to myself. And I just saw a medic who made me promise to stop, so really, I’m fine.”

“Hm.” Anko tilted her head back, considering the weather above them and suspiciously asked, “So—you promised to stop, and that’s it? Cold turkey?”

“Well, I—uh. I want to try but…” Sakura shrugs.

“Not so easy?”

“Yeah.” Sakura admits with a sigh.

“Listen, I’m no expert, but that shit isn’t ever gonna be solved quickly.”

Sakura, despite herself, can feel the beginnings of tears forming. Why do adults suddenly have to take an interest in her wellbeing _now,_ and why are they so unwilling to make it easier? Anko must notice the frustration welling up in the girl beside her, because she hastily adds,

“But it can be! Fixed, I mean, totally. You just need to expect a little less from yourself, you know?”

Expect _less_? No, Sakura has no idea what this woman means. She shakes her head no, and Anko scratches at her neck and considers how to explain.

“Listen, like… I used to hate the way I fought, because my sensei was a total bastard. Shit, wait, you’re a kid—uh—he’s….uh, a real meanie?”

“You can say bastard, Anko-san.” Sakura says with a snort. It’s kind of endearing, especially since this woman was trying to terrify her out of the chuunin exams just a few months ago.

“Oh thank kami. Okay, he was a real bastard, so I didn’t want to fight like him. So was every time I had to rely on his techniques in a battle to survive something I should beat myself up over? No way! It takes ages to learn how to fight in a new way, dumby. So don’t feel bad if you slip up sometimes—just keep trying, yeah?”

Sakura considers her words carefully, twiddling with the dango-skewer loosely. There’s no fault in her logic, and Sakura’s in a good enough mood to convince herself she won’t give in the very next time the itch hits her.

“Yeah, okay, Anko-san. Thank you!” She says, and Anko awkwardly pats her on the head like a dog before turning to vanish, abandoning Sakura to whatever random spot they’ve walked to during their conversation. She pauses, then points at Sakura with a great deal of conviction.

“Also! Anybody tries to fuck you, find me. I’ll fix them. Like a dog. With a kunai.”

Sakura returns a far less terrifying version of her smile. “You got it, Anko-san.” She replies. The woman vanishes in a puff of smoke and leaves. Sakura decides she’ll take the long way back to the training grounds and enjoy the nice weather.

 

By the time she gets back, the boys are gone. She can only hope whatever newest contest they’ve devised won’t get them all in trouble with the Hokage again, and sets about finding her far more responsible training partners instead.

“Sensei! Senpai! I’m back from my mission!”

Neji is the first to turn and spot her, the softie, and Tenten attempts to take advantage of his distraction to aim a jab towards his chest that he easily grabs, shooting a disapproving glare towards his teammate for the effort.

“You didn’t say match-over.” Tenten offers with an unapologetic grin, and Neji sighs.

“You’re setting a terrible example for your student, Tenten.” He says, before finally letting go of her hand and turning to give Sakura a polite nod.

“It’s good to see you, Sakura-san.” He says, and Sakura sticks out her tongue.

“That’s no fun! You’ve got to give me a nickname, too.”

Tenten hides a snort poorly behind the palm of her hand. “Yeah, Neji, give her a nickname.”

He sighs, rolls his eyes, but obliges as close as he can. “Sakura- _chan_?”

“Not a nickname, but I’ll take it.” Sakura declares, before pulling both the overly serious boy and delighted older girl into a warm hug. She didn’t realize how much she’d missed them until she finally saw them again.

“Oh, well, thanks for the approval, your majesty.” Neji mutters, and now both the girls are laughing.

“Neji made a _joke_! Oh, kid, ditch your team and join Team Gai. Five-man cells had to happen eventually, right?”

“Do you really want her meeting Gai-sensei?”

“Okay, nevermind, new plan: We all leave our teams and form a new one. I’ll be the Sensei, since obviously I’m a natural. And that Sasuke kid can join, so we can be the ‘super pretty boys and super strong girls’ team feared throughout all of the land of Fire!”

“... I could have sworn I didn’t hit your head this spar, was I mistaken?”

Yeah, Sakura definitely missed these two.

 

\---

 

Meanwhile, across the village, Naruto and Sasuke are attempting to cajole a new technique out of Jiraiya, which isn’t going nearly as well as planned.

He promised he’d tell them if they were willing to help him with his _research,_ and Sasuke hadn’t stopped to consider why Naruto had pulled such an unfortunate face at the words. What could a legendary Sannin need help with?

“You want me to go into a lingerie store.”

Sasuke is going to _kill_ Naruto at the end of this, because he’s probably not strong enough to beat Jiraiya yet but somebody has to die for putting him in this situation.

“Shh, kid, not so loud! Look, I’m banned from all the ones in Konoha—”

“Can’t imagine why.” Naruto drolls. Sasuke didn’t even know he could do that.

“Shut it, twerp! But I need new ones to describe in my novel so you have to go in and buy some for me!”

If the act itself wasn’t embarrassing enough, Sasuke knows exactly how this village’s rumor mill works. He’s been avoiding it for years, and this would destroy his carefully built reputation of zero interest in romance. If he goes in there, by _tomorrow_ every girl in the village will know, and half of them will think he’s got a girlfriend or wants a girlfriend or—ugh, gross, that he’s whipped for Sakura. He doesn’t even want to consider what the boys would say if they found out. He’s worked very hard to be an aloof loner, dammit, and some pervert with a reputation isn’t about to ruin it.

Unfortunately, said pervert seems to know exactly what he’s thinking, because he gives him a bag of clothes.

“Your _disguise_!”

Well, a disguise does make it more like an infiltration mission…

He makes it halfway through changing in a gross convenience store bathroom before he yells through the door, “I thought you said you didn’t have any lingerie, dirtbag!”

“Pfft, I said I needed _new_ lingerie, learn to listen.”

“Naruto, your sensei is worse than Kakashi.”

“Don’t remind me.”

But Jiraiya had promised a really _cool_ technique, and embarrassing a disguise as it is, it’s still a disguise, so his reputation will be intact…

Naruto’s still going to die for this later, but let it be said Sasuke isn’t one to back down from a challenge.

Which is why, two minutes later, he’s walking side by side with a transformed Naruto who’s much bustier, not that Sasuke is jealous because he’s not the one wasting chakra on fake breasts for a dumb trip. He _is_ the one wearing a wig and heels, however, so he’s not saying anything that could let Naruto point those particular facts out.

They’re almost there, when, horrifyingly, they run into _Sakura._ He hadn’t even considered that possibility, and both boys freeze. She looks at Naruto first, and doesn’t say anything. Then, she looks at Sasuke, and turns bright red.

“Uh—what do _you_ want?” Sasuke spits out, barely remembering to pitch his voice.

“Sorry! Sorry. You’re, just, uh, really cute.” Sakura says, which is not what he was expecting.

She hadn’t recognized them, then? But then why did she—

“Ah, ah, and me?” Naruto asks, leaning forward to be face-to-face with the much shorter Sakura.

“Uh, sure.” Sakura says, far less honestly. Naruto pouts at the tone, and Sasuke allows himself a smirk in the other boy’s direction.

“She’s got too good taste for you, idiot.” He says, and Sakura snorts.

“Sorry, it’s just—you two remind me of some people I know.” She explains placatingly.

A very small part of him, which he refuses to acknowledge and will never ever admit to having, wants to invite Sakura along on their terrible, awful, no-good adventure. Partially because despite himself, he likes spending time with his teammates, and partially because he wants to hear some more compliments.

But he’s not running the risk of her connecting the dots, so instead he flicks his hair and says,

“We really have to be going now.”

“Aw, but I wanna hang out with the cutie!”

He jabs an elbow into Naruto’s ribcage. “Later, idiot.”

“Oh, good idea! Let’s have a sleepover later, just us girls, yeah?”

Sakura is bright pink and her fist is clearly trembling at her side. Hm. Time for a tactical retreat.

“Yes, sounds great, now we _really_ need to go.” And with that, he grabs Naruto’s arm and drags him away, silently promising to never ever agree to another so-called mission from the toad sage.

 Sakura watches them go, before continuing on her way. She’s not going to ask how Naruto talked Sasuke into this particular prank, but she’d better clear out before whatever stink bomb or paint-filled balloon they’ve got hidden away is released.

Honestly, she’s surrounded by troublemakers and pushovers.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> big BIG thank you to Noter for yet again beta-ing ! 
> 
> in an ideal world, jiryai is dead and it's probably anko's doing. Unfortunately.... 
> 
> instead of spoilers for next chapter, instead please accept the fact that sasuke has an uncomfortable dream about that sleepover idea of naruto's, that he takes out on at least three punching bags the next day, one of which is actually Naruto. They do get taught that new technique though, despite the fact that sasuke only bought boy-short cuts and sports bras ('practicality is sexy', he defends, and nobody can tell if hes serious or not), and naruto only bought things that were neon green and in clearance for obvious reasons. 
> 
> Sakura tells Kakashi she met Anko and that "Anko-san is very cool, I want to be just like her when I grow up!" which fills Kakashi with exactly as much dread as the sentence "i've decided to grow a mullet, become a missing nin, and only date arsonists" would. His hair would turn grey if it wasn't already.


	19. Chapter 19

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> she's trying, and she's not.

“Ah, hey! Chouji!” 

Team ten turns as one to spot the girl running towards them, waving her arms excitedly. Chouji points at himself in confusion, glancing between his two teammates expectantly. Sakura giggles and points at him too, saying, “Yes, you!”

“Uh… what can I do for you, Sakura-chan?” 

She beams, finally coming to a halt in front of them. “I heard your clan has a really cool technique that involves oversizing individual limbs?”

“Ah, yeah, but it’s a clan technique so I can’t really go around teaching others…” Chouji says sheepishly. Sakura quickly waves her arms in an ‘x’ shape, hurrying to correct, 

“Oh, no, I don’t want you to teach me it! It just sounds a lot like an Oto technique, so I thought it would be good practice fighting it if we spared…”

“You...wanna spar with me?” 

“Exactly!”

“Oh. Uh...Okay.”

“Thanks, Chouji-kun, you’re the best! I promise I’ll buy lunch for you afterwards.” She said, dragging the boy away from his friends with a shocking amount of enthusiasm. 

An hour later, eating outside as Ino stewed over being ignored and Shikamaru tried to avoid her ire, they spotted Chouji frantically apologizing to Sakura as he helped her limp towards the hospital. Her leg was flattened, in an unnatural way that was scarily reminiscent of Ino’s memories of when Chouji would turn trees into  benches when he got particularly lazy. Apparently, the boy had gotten a better shot in than he’d expected, and he was desperately trying to get Sakura to accept his apology for it. 

“I’m so sorry Sakura-chan, really, I know you said it’s okay but it’s really not,  and it was so nice of you to offer to spar with me and now you’ll never wanna again and I just-”

“Chouji!” She interrupted, little whacking him on the head with the arm previously wrapped around his shoulder for support. “Enough! It’s my fault for moving slow, and I’d love to spar with you again.”

“Really?”

“Of course! You took me seriously as an opponent. That’s more than I can say for my teammates, lately.”

As if summoned by the mention, Naruto came sprinting up, nearly as frazzled as Chouji, and scooped Sakura up before she could continue her walk. 

“Sakura! You promised!” He demanded, and now even Shikamaru was paying full attention to the scene before them. Sakura just sheepishly laughed it off, leaving it perfectly unclear what exactly she had promised Naruto, and he gave Chouji a passing glance-

“Hey, Chouji, I’m gonna take her to granny, bye!

\- And took off running in the opposite direction of the hospital.

Well. That was odd. Shikamaru was about to return to his attempt to eat in peace, before Ino could break out of her revere and start screaming at Chouji for details, when he spotted a small shape dart in the direction that Naruto had run. A shape that looked suspiciously like an Uchiha. 

Shikamaru gulped. Ino could  _ not  _ find out about that particular detail, or he’d never hear the end of it. 

 

Despite Shikamaru’s best efforts, however, he couldn’t keep the sudden close-knit attitude of team seven from his most loud-mouthed of teammates. Less than a week later, walking through the market to finish chores for their mothers, Ino and he both overheard a conversation they found difficult to believe.

“You promised you’d teach me.” 

That sounds like Sasuke, particularly the petulance of the whine, but Shikamaru can’t bring himself to genuinely believe that a boy as stuck up as the Uchiha would be demanding help.

“And I will, Sasuke-kun, as soon as it’s  _ safe. _ ”

Demanding help from  _ Sakura.  _

Ino turns mechanically in the direction of the sounds, eyes flicking about for the source of what must be a shared audio hallucination.

Sakura has a basket of fruits and bandages in her arms. Sasuke is holding a potted plant. They both watch, wide-eyed, as the pink-haired girl reaches forward to tweak Sasuke’s nose. The boy does not react.  _ Interesting. Horrifying. He’ll never hear the end of this. _

“It’s not safe when you do it either.” He grumbles, and Sakura shifts her eyes away. 

“Yeah, but I’m a bit more expendable when it comes to your revenge plan, Sasuke-kun.”

“Sakura-”

“I know, I know. As soon as granny finishes teaching me how to heal it in  _ others,  _ I’ll let you try.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

“Good.”

It’s practically a thank you. From  _ Sasuke.  _ Ino is turning almost as purple as her outfit.

“Ino, breath.” Shikamaru orders, and for once, his teammate listens to him. She lets out a huff of air, and begins tugging at her ponytail almost as frantically as she does when her mother’s out on a dangerous mission and running late. To his surprise, she’s not angry or confused so much as self-reprimanding.

“I’ve fallen so far behind, I didn’t even recognize  _ half  _ those emotions!” She mutters, glaring at Shikamaru like it’s his fault. “I’m stuck with you two dummies and I’m late to the knowledge that Sasuke is learning how to ask questions! And I  _ refuse  _ to beg Sakura for intel, and maybe he’s gotten better at spotting when he’s getting watched since last time, and my mind map’s all  _ wrong! _ ” She pauses. Shikamaru does not like her expression. “Do you think the Yamanake technique-”

“Yes, it would be unethical.”

“I wasn’t going to ask about  _ ethics,  _ idiot. I was going to ask-”

“-He would be upset about it, yes.”

She sighed. “Damn.” She tugged Shikamaru forward, contemplating her options. “Is your older cousin still single?” She asks, and Shikamaru  _ really, really  _ doesn’t like where this is going.

“Troublesome woman.” He tells her, and she cracks a grin. 

“I’ll take that as a yes.” She says. It is. He hates that she knows that. 

 

Sakura has been trying, diligently, to forget about how nice it is to shatter her own limbs and put them back together again. It’s not easy to forget, especially since her current career path involves a lot more injuries than would be ideal for someone in  _ recovery.  _ That’s what her therapist calls it anyways, when she bothers to show up. The woman likes to talk, certainly has a lot to say, but Sakura’s not very keen on listening. 

She’d much rather focus her energy on learning how to heal others. Granny has been nice enough to begin correcting her mistakes- so many, many mistakes, Sakura is horrified to learn- and showing her how to properly channel her energies so that she stops corrupting her cells. 

 

Unfortunately, healing is not nearly as satisfying as hurting. The pitying part of her brain that she’d thought she’d been rid of long ago is still there, after all, and it’s hungry for her to make mistakes more than it is for her to correct them. She’s  _ supposed  _ to feel bad, and short of chakra exhaustion, healing others won’t deliver on that. She’s not so good at this recovery thing, after all. 

So Sakura spends more and more time looking for a fight, and trying to lose.

Tenten and Neji do not approve. She’d tried, at first, with them- the Hyuuga style, after all, can do some serious damage to internal organs; and Tenten is a master of an endless variety of sharp, pointy, and otherwise dangerous weapons. Unfortunately, they know her, and within her first trip-up, they turn into a set of hackle-raised hounds out for blood.

“What the hell was  _ that? _ ” Tenten had accused. Neji had stumbled back when a blow that had no business landing had made contact with Sakura’s side, and was now busy staring at her disapprovingly. 

“I- I just, you know.” Sakura shrugs, trying for nonchalant when she’s really just desperate they won’t say anything to anyone. “Wasn’t fast enough.”

Neither teen seems to take her explanation as satisfactory.

“I agreed to this so you’d get better. I have no idea what-  _ that,  _ was, but I’m not wasting my time on someone who’d lose on purpose.” Neji hissed, rubbing at his hand where it’d managed to connect to her ribs. (A set of beautiful fractures that she’d healed in seconds, a delicious ache of bruises she left standing, a jarring sensation to-) He doesn’t offer more than a second of judgemental, furious eye contact, before stalking away without a glance back. 

Tenten remains behind, and Sakura isn’t sure if that’s a good sign or not. 

“We’re used to people pushing themselves.” Tenten says, and Sakura holds back a sigh because this is the start to a Sensei-speech if she’s ever heard one, “We’re on the same team as Rock Lee, for god’s sake. But you can’t just- you can’t use us to  _ hurt you,  _ Sakura. We’re your friends, and Neji probably feels like an asshole right now, because you  _ made him  _ hurt you.”

She hadn’t thought about it like that. She hadn’t even considered it might bother them, because- well. It had never seemed to bother anyone else if she got hurt along the way, so what was so bad about her not minding either?

But they cared. So it mattered. She wasn’t used to mattering, and suddenly far too many people seemed to think she did. 

“I’m sorry.” Sakura offered, pitifully, and Tenten let out an exhausted sigh and shrugged. “Tell Neji that. And don’t do that shit again.”

Sakura nodded, quickly, and bowed, before stumbling away to consider who in this village could care less about her. If she can’t ask friends to hurt her, surely there must be some strangers with no such reservations? 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> angry tenten has a pottymouth (like teacher, like student, aye?). sakura is trying but she's not so great at understanding WHY she's supposed to be trying which makes it hard for her to succeed. sorry for the wait, im still pretty blocked on this one but i promise i have Plans for it. some of which might be a lot angstier than this chapter indicates...


	20. It’s called a crush

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> back to Suna, back to exams.

“The Chuunin exams are returning early, since it’s recently been leaked that there was some...interference, from upper-level nin during the Forest of Death stage. If you agree, I’ll recommend you for it again.”

“I- where is it taking place, Sensei?”

“Suna.”

They share a look, between them all, and the decision is an easy one. 

“We’ll do it!” Naruto says, and they all nod in fierce agreement. 

“I’ll be giving you all individual training in preparation for the finals, as well as continuing your group training. Naruto- you need to work on stealth and strategy. I’ve pulled in a few favors, and Shikaku Nara will be giving you instructions every day, from three to seven.”

“Aw, man!” Naruto wailed, already pouting over the reserved sounding training ahead of him. Kakashi steamrolled on.

“Sasuke- I’ve managed to petition the Hokage for access to Uchiha sealed techniques for you. The next two months, you’ll be reading from two to six on your clan’s original techniques and bloodline traits, and then we’ll put them into practice from six to seven.”

Sasuke brightened visibly at this, clearly proud to tackle his clan’s specialities. 

“Sakura- you’ve got a strong elemental connection to water and earth. I’ll be training you from two to six on offensive techniques. You’ll be spending the rest of the evening with Tsunade or Shizune, both of whom have agreed to give you extra training in healing, so long as you continue to avoid a relapse.”

Sakura nodded happily, even as a twitch of her hand gaveway just how difficult she was finding that stipulation to maintain. 

“Lovely! Of course, from four am to one pm, we’ll all be training together, so there’s no need to worry about getting lonely.”

“Ah, sen _ seii _ i-”

“Wouldn’t want to fail to become chuunin twice, now would we? How embarrassing on your permanent files if you did-”

“Yes, Sensei.” 

It doesn’t take long for the new routine to become normal for them, shifting their habits and slowly knitting them even closer together than the past exam had. This isn’t mind numbing, near-death adrenaline- it’s trust, building slowly, gently, twining their days into something wholly new.

Sasuke is quiet from overwork, prone to grumbling and napping in odd locations. He seems to switch between overly attached to his teammates and distant, depending on the day, and presumably whatever ancient Uchiha tradition he learned he’d missed out on from the latest scroll. Sakura lent him her supplies for personal hygiene on the fly, while Naruto took care of cooking for the three of them. It was only a few days into their ‘suna program’ before they’d all agreed to move in together. So worn out from their days, the idea of combining efforts seemed the only way to survive the rest of their training. Sakura’s parents had agreed so long as she checked in on weekends, so long as she didn’t go around spreading her housing situation to their civilian friends. 

Naruto, in turn, is twice as energetic in his downtime to make up for sitting still for hours on end, thinking and planning and not being allowed to  _ act  _ until he’d considered every move at least seven times. He was beginning to understand why Shikamaru slept all the time- it seemed Nara training would either turn you into a ball of pure energy, or you’d have to adapt to the habits of a sloth to not go insane. Naruto opted for the ball of energy route, much to his teammate’s disappointment, since it resulted in far too many pranks and a few too many disastrous accidents. Sakura had begun to force him on jogs when he got too twitchy, ever since he broke Sasuke’s mother’s vase by accident.

Sakura- she’s reticent to call herself cured, the itch still ever present, but it’s been a while since she broke her promise. It helps, having her teammates so close by, keeping an eye on her. It’s small, but the disappointment in Sasuke’s expression, the unease and guilt in Naruto’s, when she slips up-  it’s enough of a reminder to make her behave, at least most of the time. She’s been working hard with Tsunade, but more than that- 

Specialized attention from her Jounin-Sensei had once been a laughable idea, and now she’s  _ got it.  _ Miserable, terrible work, of course- hours of practicing the same move over and over, passing out and being forced right back up, but it means Kakashi-Sensei believes she can do it, believes in her abilities, and that makes her push herself. At the very least, she’s so exhausted from the training she’s normally asleep before she can even contemplate scratching her itch. 

The time passes quickly, faster than any of them wants to admit. The focus on their future was a sharp reminder that most genin teams split up soon after chuunin is reached. Naruto was openly against that, demanding they do so well that JiJi would  _ have  _ to keep them together, and Sakura was willing to admit she’d miss more than Sasuke-kun if team seven was disbanded. Still, misgivings aside, the day arrives to leave and they all show up ahead of time, even Kakashi- who only proves two hours late, as opposed to his usual standard. (Naruto still complains, and Sakura eggs him on.)

They stand outside the gate, the guards giving a friendly wave and one of them shouting encouragements. It seemed Konoha had high expectations for this ‘rematch’, and Sakura could only hope they would meet them. The fanfare was toned down, turning the event into something more businesslike than performative, but it still proved nerve wracking to withstand. 

It seems everything is moving too fast for her, because they make it to Suna in no time at all, and they’re filling out paperwork before Sakura can blink. It’s dizzying, but when she starts to get too nervous she sneaks a glance towards Naruto, who always returns it with a thumbs-up and an encouraging nod. It’s more than enough to keep her moving along.  _ I love my team  _ is a quiet, thrumming thought in the moment, and Sakura clings to it as wanders through their assigned outer-campment. It’s a little rude, to be honest, that they’re being kept outside the walls of the village, but understandable. The last Hokage had passed away- presumably peacefully, though hidden assassinations are always possible- soon after the last exams, and it was a state of weakness more than enough to put Suna on edge. Their decision to host the exam at all was likely one of pride, a gambit to present a strong front to the competing villages. 

The sand is hot enough to burn her toes through her sandals, and she tries to heal them without chasing the experience. It’s difficult, but she distracts herself with thoughts of potential tests, the sort of challenges Suna would specialize in. She should’ve asked Shizune more about poisons… She shakes herself, forcing her focus onto her teammates instead. Naruto seems to have made a few friends already, and she’ll have to inspect them later to make sure it’s not some sort of trap, but she’s happy for the boy as it is. He’s even getting along with that odd boy with the purple facepaint, trading bad jokes and half-thoughtout insults with him. Sasuke is- well. 

She hadn’t noticed, and it’s a bit of a shock that reading Sasuke’s moods, at least just staring at his face, wasn’t a priority for her anymore- but she hadn’t noticed how twitchy he was until now that she’s paying attention. The last contest hadn’t gone so well, she knows intimately, and she feels like a fool for thinking it wouldn’t affect him at all. He’d been the target of that horrifying woman, and they’d never figured out why. This must feel like a terrible gamble for him.  _ I’ll talk to him later, let him know that I’ll be watching his back.  _ She decides, knowing it’s not much to offer but it’s all she has to give. 

She sees the speckles of sand following her, has noticed them for a while now, and gives them a discreet flicker of her chakra. She’d hoped Gaara would be here, wanted to ask him about how his sealing had gone, but the boy seemed shy at times, tentative in his approach, and she didn’t want to spook him. Her message  seems to have reached him, because the sand grains swirl a little before her before drifting away, as friendly a greeting as any. Sometimes she wishes her teammates would be as polite as Gaara-kun. 

She drifts about for a while, going through her equipment with nimble fingers, checking for any damage. It takes some time, double-checking that everything is in it’s place for tomorrow, but she’s sitting uselessly in her tent when Kakashi pulls back the flap and says,

“Dinner, Sakura-chan.”

She wants to protest, her stomach in far too many knots for that, but she can tell from the look in her Sensei’s eye that she won’t get away with that excuse. “Is it lizard?” she asks instead, and Kakashi-sensei laughs. 

“Nothing so fancy.”

He leads her out to the fire, and she admires the hot glow of it in the fading light. Everyone’s split back into their respective camps, and now it’s a mishmash of Konoha nin that Sakura easily recognizes and can’t put a name to. Some have obviously never been in the desert before, dressed so poorly for the shifting weather or showing off some vicious sunburns, but she’s proud to say that Ino and Chouji both look more than passable. Shikamaru, less so, and she can already hear Ino explaining that the boy’d fallen asleep outside earlier to Kiba, laughing so hard that the boy’s rolling in the sand and getting covered in the stuff. She stifles a chuckle of her own, giving Ino a small wave that gets cheerfully returned, and finally makes it close enough to grab some of the food. She tries to eat it carefully, listening to all her fellow genin recount their less-than-impressive adventures (She tries not to judge, but it’s hard not to compare to her own experiences), and commiserating with the lot of them when the Tora missions were brought up. A warmth settles in her gut, far beyond the good food and hot fire, and she hopes it’s the Will of Fire she hears so often about from Sensei. Being part of this, part of the new generation- she finally feels her nerves settle down, knows that this exam will go fine. If she doesn’t pass, that’s fine- she’ll just have to do her best and know she can always do better. She’s not a nin for rank or esteem, but to serve Konoha, and seeing the love and teasing thrown around the campsite is the perfect reminder of that. This is Konoha.

She feels a tap on her shoulder, and she’s surprised to see it’s Sasuke-kun when she turns around, looking furtive and embarrassed to be there. He won’t meet her eyes for long, but says, “Can we talk?”  

“Of course, Sasuke-kun!” She says eagerly despite herself, jumping up and tossing the rest of her meet to Akamaru. Her efforts to keep her hands clean hadn’t been entirely successful, so she wipes her hands on Naruto’s jacket- snorting at his protests, as if she hasn’t been trying to destroy the damn thing for over two months now and force him into getting rid of it- and nearly slams into Sasuke’s side. It’s not that she isn’t used to interacting with him by now, of course she is, but-

Sasuke never  _ asks  _ to interact with anybody, is all. The closest he’s come before is picking fights with Naruto, and now he’s actually asked her. Her! To come and talk with him, alone- like she’s important to him. Part of the team. It’s probably just about strategy for tomorrow, since dumby Naruto wouldn’t keep it to himself if he remembered it at all, but that’s a kind of respect she’s eager to take. 

They go farther away from the group than she expected, Sasuke speeding up his pace as they go on. Sakura does a quick Kai, just to be sure this isn’t a trick, but it’s not some sort of prank by an opposing team- this is Sasuke, in the flesh. When they finally reach a place distant enough for him, they sit down in the cool sand, and Sakura tries desperately to understand his motivations here. It’s obvious from his hesitance, now that they’ve stopped, that this isn’t just a discussion of strategy. She thinks, hard, about what he might want. 

She remembers this morning, the past few days now that she thinks on it- even the full month leading up to this. Sasuke’d been on edge, and she hadn’t noticed until now, but maybe- maybe this is his way of reaching out. She’s the most emotionally competent of the group, she knows, and Sasuke knows it too. Maybe this is Sasuke’s version of wanting her help. It’s the least she can do, after all he and the rest of the team have looked after her, and she leaps at the chance. 

“I know you’re going to pass this time, Sasuke-kun.” She reassures him. He’d seemed so nervous, lately, all twitchy and on edge, so different from the confident boy she’d grown up admiring, but he’d only gotten stronger, and she hoped he could see that. “Last time- stuff got in the way. But this is going to be a fair contest, and there’s no way you’ll lose in something like that.” 

She’s trying not to look at him, pretty and silent and listening to her in the moonlight. She’s trying to be a good teammate, but it’s hard to get over a crush, even one you know will never be requited, and Suna is far more romantic than it has any right being. She just hopes he hears her sincerity and knows that her confidence is unwavering, hear the unspoken words that she’ll help him the whole way however she can.She feels the gentle press of fingers interlacing with hers, and holds back on the urge to jerk away. She loves this boy, even if he’s pushing against the boundaries she set up for  _ his  _ sake. If he needs a hand to hold, she can do that. 

“Sakura.” He says, and she finally,  _ finally  _ turns to look at him. He’s even paler in the moonlight, like a ghost, and his eye shine like stars. She hates that she wants him to kiss her, even now, when she’s trying to be a good friend and a good teammate and what he needs is undemanding support, not a silly girl with a silly crush. He leans forward, and for a second, she tricks herself. She closes her eyes on instinct, because she thinks that maybe- maybe. His fist had been at his side, closed tight on a kunai like he always did when he was nervous- his hand in hers had been shaking, ever so slightly. She thought maybe the moonlight had made her pretty too, just this once. It doesn’t need to be forever. She can feel the softest bit of breath against her face.

His fist is through her chest. This isn’t the problem. 

The problem is that she did not  _ ask  _ him to do that. And when her eyes jerk open, his expression isn’t of surprise, or anger, or self hatred. There’s no straining against a puppet-chakra jutsu, no telltale signs of an imposter. This is her Sasuke, and he looks  _ sad.  _

He did this on purpose. He aimed.There is a blade through most of her neck, and a fist through her chest, and her teammate is looking at her with intent and tears in his eyes but he’s not trying to undo what he’s done, which means he meant for this to happen. 

“What the fuck, Sasuke.” 

He stumbles back. Her blood is on his fist, on his knife, splatters of it are across his face. There are already grains of sand sticking to her blood. She can make out the speckles even in the uneven light from the moon. 

“I’m- I had to!” He says, and he’s staring at where her injuries are healing as if he’d forgotten just how quickly she could do that. “To defeat my brother-”

“What the  _ fuck. _ ” She says again, because they’ve been over this. They’ve talked about this, late at night as a team, stretched thin by long days working to grow stronger together. He was going to take down Itachi and team seven would be there to help him, every step of the way, and how is she supposed to do that if she’s dead and he killed her? How is she supposed to heal him if she’s gone? 

“It’s the only way!” He yells, desperate, and she’s pretty sure he’s saying that for himself as much as for her. “I have to get the Mangekyou if I want any chance at beating him, Sakura, and-”

She finds she doesn’t care what the hell a Mangekyou is or what it does. He was one of the reasons she’d been trying so hard to get better, because she thought he cared, because sticking around to help him take revenge was a reason to stay alive longer, and-

And he’d tried to kill her. And he still hadn’t said he was sorry about it.

“Go away.” She tells him. Because she’s not ready to retaliate, dammit, but she can’t really handle listening to him talk anymore. 

He goes, and she stays where she is. 

_ Relapse,  _ the therapist had called it. She spends the night trying to tear out what hurts, desperate to find something more painful than the trick that Sasuke had pulled on her, and failing. She walks back to the camp in the morning light, sticky with blood and covered in her own torn flesh, quivering from chakra exhaustion and a dreadful sense of emptiness where hope used to reside. She must look like a corpse. She feels like one. 

She walks past her teammates and doesn’t stop until she’s beyond the Konoha housing and at the edge of Suna’s gate, until the sun is beating harsh and hot on her back and her skin is peeling from sunburns, and she finally lets herself fall to her knees and scream. 

She wakes up surrounded by cool, wet sand, with pale eyes staring back at her. 

“Who do I kill?” Gaara says, because he’s never been one for subtlety, and she lets out a wet laugh that sends her sore throat hacking. She thinks she finally understands why this boy is so averse to blinking- every time she does, she can feel that hot puff of air and the press of a hand against her chest. The world is out to get her, after all, and she misses being worthless. 

“I don’t know.” She admits. “I don’t know anymore.” 

It used to be so obvious. It still should be. She’s always been the expendable one, always been fine with suffering so the others wouldn’t, so how is it fair that now, all of a sudden, she wants  _ Sasuke  _ to hurt instead? 

She sits, cocooned by sand that must be soaked in the blood of at least a hundred men, and cries until she can’t anymore, under the watchful gaze of the only person who’d been honest about once wanting her dead. It’s the closest thing to calm she’ll feel for a long, long time. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> figured a long update was better than a short filler and then Plot Whammy.
> 
> sorry, sakura. that was... a rough one, even for my usual standard.


	21. repercussions and reperations

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Naruto has no idea what's going on, but he sure doesn't like it.

He’d intended to pretend they were ambushed by an opposing team; discreet sabotage wasn’t unheard of at the exams, after all. He could play off the murder as someone else’s fault, return to the camp without having to hide his emotional state, he’d planned it so well, in the time that he’d had.... except she lived. 

He thought the element of surprise would’ve been enough to throw her off. He’d taken out at least a third of her organ with the punch, her air with the slit to her throat, and she’d  _ still  _ survived. 

For a moment, Sasuke’s mind snapped back to the sight of her, trusting him, eyes closed and trying so hard to make him feel better, and- he knew what he saw. His plan  _ had  _ worked. For a moment, for a brief, brief moment, Sakura was  _ dead.  _ Her eyes flickered out, her breath didn’t come, and he’d thought he’d succeeded. Before he could panic, though, she’d started talking. Opened her eyes and let him see just how much she hated him, worse- just how much what he’d done had hurt her. She’d trusted him like he had never managed to trust anyone, not after Itachi, and now he’d ruined that. 

He drags his thoughts away, careful to wash off his face with his water, trying desperately to cover his tracks. 

He’s half a mile away before he realizes that everything is far too clear. He pulls out his kunai and stares at it’s reflective surface, and shudders. 

It hadn’t worked. 

The sharingan staring back at him is the same as before, and he’d been horrified enough to unfurl it and record every second for future torment, but she hadn’t been dead long enough to give him what he needed. He wanted to scream, to tear out his hair and bang his fists in the sand. He’d ruined himself for  _ this _ ? Itachi had done far worse, and never been tricked like this by fate. Unlike Itachi, Sasuke’s guilt could talk back, and was more than likely going to kill him when she got over the surprise. 

It wasn’t that he wanted to kill her. That was the whole point. He’d wanted her to live, more than anyone else, because Sakura was soft and unyielding and gentle. She babied them all like she wasn’t the weak link, and when she’d turned to self destruction he’d  _ worried.  _ Naruto was an equal, loath as it was to admit, and when the boy tried dangerously hard at something it would just push Sasuke to be better. But Sakura was something of a responsibility, and the idea that she could one day push too hard and die, trying to keep pace with him- it was concerning. He wasn’t used to concern, but he’d felt it, harsh and real and at times far too consuming. 

But he’d always put Itachi first. Sacrifice was essential for revenge, and if the only way to kill his brother was to kill Sakura first-  _ it wasn’t a choice _ . He tried to reassure himself. He hadn’t had a choice, not really. It doesn’t ease his guilt. 

He makes it back to the camp silently, pretends to sleep, pretends to wake up in the morning. Walks out of his tent like everything is normal. Naruto is waiting, pacing back and forth. 

“Sasuke! Did you see what happened to Sakura-chan? She was all- gross, I guess. I think she had a ‘lapse’ _. _ ” Naruto mutters the last part, trying to be discrete when they’re surrounded by other interested but distant Konoha teams. His heartbeat stutters, but he rolls his eyes. “How should I know?” He asks, and Naruto pouts. 

“Don’t be like that, douchebag, we both know you care too.” the boy says, poking at Sasuke’s chest. Sasuke flinches back, the movement too similar to his own a few hours ago, before he sighs and shrugs. “Whatever, just ask her yourself.” 

“I  _ would,  _ if anyone knew where she was!” 

He hates that those words scare him. So what if she’s missing? She’s supposed to be  _ dead.  _ What does it matter to him if she’s hurt, if her healing wasn’t as thorough as he’d thought, if she stumbled into an opposing team and met the fate he’d set her towards. 

_ She’s supposed to be dead. _

It doesn’t change anything. He’s worried. He still cares.  _ This is hell _ .

They make their way towards the exams entrance, hoping Sakura had just left early for them as a matter of habit. To Naruto’s relief, their missing teammate is indeed waiting there.Sakura is sitting next to the red-headed bastard they’d escorted to Rain, her head pressed into his shoulder and eyes closed tight. Gaara was staring outwards, clearly acting as if he was on watch, and his sand was hovering protectively over the both of them. 

“Hello.” He says, offering her teammates a nod. The sand does not fall. 

“What-” Naruto starts to yell, until the boy holds up a finger to his lips and offers Naruto a stern glare. 

“She’s tired.” Gaara says. Naruto whispers, as loud as his normal speaking voice, instead.

“What happened to her?”

“Something bad.”

“Yeah, great, super informative. Is she okay?” 

“Her pulse is normal.” Gaara offers, as if it’s not just as cryptic as his last response. “I am uncertain as to her emotional state. It’s not exactly my expertise.”

Naruto can’t argue with that. 

“Yeah, well, we can take care of her now.” Naruto says, a little nervous at leaving Sakura with the creepy guy, despite how well the two seemed to get on. “We’re her  _ teammates,  _ after all.”

Gaara levels a very unimpressed look at the both of them, and Sasuke wilts particularly under his gaze. It’s unusual reaction, and Gaara takes note. 

“I think she’d prefer to stay with me.” He says, and it doesn’t sound much like a suggestion. 

“You can’t just...stick around.” Naruto points out, before gesturing towards his headband. “You’re already a chuunin. This exam is for genin!” 

Gaara shrugs.

“My sister is the Kazakage. I can get away with a lot.” 

Today is a day for Naruto to lose arguments, apparently. They sit, silently, waiting as other teams mill about and avoid eye contact with Gaara. His time in the forest of death had apparently left scars, if the small bubble of avoidance was to be believed. Naruto could only hope it would prove useful in the actual exam, if they were forced to let the boy tag along like he demanded. 

When Sakura finally wakes up, it’s with a yelp and an instant reach for her kunai until Gaara places a soft hand to her shoulder. The grains of sand clinging to it and scratching at her skin must bring her back to the present, because she shoots the boy a shaky smile before withdrawing from her stance. 

“Thank you for watching over me, Gaara-kun.” She says, giving him an overly polite bow. He nods awkwardly, clearly uncertain how to handle the situation, and only grows more confused when she stops his attempt to follow her through the genin entrance.

“I’ll be fine.” She reassures him, before saying something too quiet for Naruto or Sasuke to hear and taking a handful of sand from the boy, that she calmly slips into her pocket. The redhead finally walks away, but the sensation of being watched doesn’t leave the rest of team seven’s backs until much later. 

With every step she takes towards them, her expression grows more vacant, the weight of her limbs pressing deeper into the sand. She spends the morning wait time calmly, efficiently, running through kata after kata. 

“You could use a bath, Sakura-chan.” Naruto had suggested. She’d ignored him- not even a warning hit for the implied insult. “You’re kind of...gross, right now.”

“It’ll intimidate the others.” She finally replies, and he shuts up, because he can’t really disagree. Right now he’s finding her rather intimidating himself, and he  _ knows  _ the blood soaked into her clothes is her own. (Probably.) 

They make their way through the entrance of the exams as a unit, only Naruto takes middle point for once at Sasuke’s suggestion. Sakura does not argue. Naruto hates the unease slowly suffocating their group, the tenseness that he bets either of his teammates could name if they’d be willing to let him in on it. Sakura keeps staring at Sasuke, but it’s not like normal, and the boy isn’t looking back. There’s something wrong, and Naruto hates that he has no idea what it is. 

She’s twitchy. Off-keel. Like she normally is, when she’s been forced off her- uh, habit- except he  _ knew  _ she just used it yesterday, which means something really must’ve thrown her off. Sakura’s supposed to be the calm one of the group, and right now that seems to be his job, which is just a disaster waiting to happen. 

“Will one of you tell me what’s going  _ on  _ already?” He asks, exasperated. Sasuke flinches, foot slipping slightly off-course and he has to correct his mistake quickly to not end up face-first in the sand. 

“Ask Sasuke-kun.” Sakura responds, refusing to look away from the horizon, clutching tight to bag with their assignment. “I wouldn’t know.”

Sasuke is tight-lipped as ever, but Naruto can see the way his arms are shaking and it’s impossible for it to be exhaustion this early. “It’s nothing.” He finally says, infuriatingly, because Naruto knows that can’t be true.

“I always was.” Sakura whispers, body tight and harsh but the words even harsher. 

“Sakura-chan!” 

“Don’t worry about it, Naruto. I’m just being silly.” she says, forces the words out and it hurts to see her do that. “We should really focus on the test. We haven’t even found a safe place to set up camp, and the Suna teams will definitely have an advantage.”

Naruto huffs, but goes along with her suggestion, unable to figure out what else he could do instead.

Sasuke cannot escape the feeling he’s being watched. His movements are growing more eradicate, he can tell, but he can’t stop it. He has no idea why Sakura isn’t telling on him, isn’t attacking him right now. Is she waiting until he lets his guard down, like he did to her?  _ I just won’t let my guard down,  _ he decides, a bizarre sense of pride rising up at the idea. He doesn’t need his teammates. He doesn’t need their help, doesn’t need them looking out for them, he can do everything himself, just like Itachi.  _ She won’t get to me!  _ His mind shrieks, defiant, and when Sakura edges a little farther ahead he forces himself to move faster and keep up. She won’t be able to set a trap for him if he keeps pace. 

_ Is Naruto in on it? Not fair!  _ He shoots furtive looks at the blonde boy inbetween them, trying to decipher what the boy’s pout means. Is he clueless? Or did Sakura tell him? If he chose, who would he choose- not Sakura, of course, it wouldn’t be fair because Sasuke wasn’t going to kill Naruto and Sakura shouldn’t make him have to kill them both. Because Naruto would, he  _ would  _ pick Sakura, the idiot, probably want to tear him apart for trying to send Sakura away. Why did she have to come back? Why did she have to do this to him, when everything would be easier if she was just dead? 

_ Of course she came back, did you really think that would work? _

The thought is not his own, but it worms its way to the front of his mind and he can’t remove it. Because- did he? Or had he expected her to heal, to survive, to hate him and leave him and take the rest of the team with her? Of course not, because-

Naruto is staring at him, he realizes. Sakura is- where’s Sakura? His heart rate spikes, desperately searching for her, because what if she’s sneaking up behind him and-

“Sasuke, you don’t look so good.” Naruto says, and Sasuke barely hears him. Diversion, is it a diversion, is Naruto just trying to stop him from looking so Sakura can-

“Found it! Rocks should be tall enough to shelter us from the winds.” Sakura shouts out, not too far away.

“Great job, Sakura-chan!” Naruto calls out with a whoop, taking Sasuke by the wrist to drag him over. Sasuke lets him, shoving down every impulse to fight back that he can. So silly to think Naruto would side with Sakura, Naruto would never.  _ Or would he?  _ Whispers in his head, and Sasuke tears his arm out of Naruto’s grasp and presses himself into the sheltered corner of the rocks, his back safe and his guard up.

Sakura is- different. Sitting out front, in the beating sun, sweating and concentrating on something nobody else can see. Fingers digging into her thigh, eyes squeezed tight, and Naruto sits between the two of them, glancing frantically back and forth. 

“Sakura, what are you doing?” Naruto finally asks, apparently deciding she’s the safest one to question. She grunts, pries her hand loose, leaving bright bloody indents in her skin, and looks up with exhausted eyes at Naruto. 

“Taking precautions.” She says. 

“I thought Granny made you promise not to.” Naruto mumbles, nervous. Sakura scoffs.

“Yeah, well, how do we know Tsunade-san doesn’t just want me  _ weak _ ? Easier to pick off, if she needed to.”

“What? Sakura-chan, why would she want that?”

“You don’t need to know why to have someone after you.” Sakura says, eyes flickering briefly to Sasuke before jerking back to Naruto’s face. “You have to look out for yourself, Naruto. Just in case.” 

Something in her words seems to set her off, because she leans forward and grabs Naruto’s shoulder, pulls in closer. Sasuke tenses up,  _ is she going to tell him,  _ but then she wipes at his face with her bloody fingertips. 

“You need to be stronger. You can’t always depend on- whatever, just. Please. Please?”

“Yeah, yeah, sure, Sakura-chan. I promise I’ll get stronger! Then I’ll watch out for all of us.”

She pulls back. Clutches her own hands. “Not too strong.” She mutters, breaks her fingers without even noticing and heals them just as quick.  _ Have to be stronger. How do you beat a Jinnchuurik? Or bloodlines? How do you win?  _ God, she’s worked so hard just to keep pace, just to survive, she didn’t even consider winning before. Didn’t think she might have to beat her teammates one day.  _ I was such an idiot.  _

She has to be better. More than that, she has to be the best. She’ll get through this exam, go back to Konoha, and- and. Figure out who’s safe, and who’s not, and then she’ll get strong enough to destroy everyone who could hurt her.  _ Everyone.  _ She likes the sound of that. Healing is one thing, but destruction- finally, finally, she understands that power is just another word for security. Nobody will ever hurt her again, if she’s too strong to fight, if she never trusts the wrong person again, nothing will even touch her. 

Still. In the meantime, she sits, trusting Naruto at her back just barely, Sasuke not at all, and the dry desert air above all else. Digs her fingers into her calves, now, deeper and deeper even as the pain makes her tear up, and  _ works _ . 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> poor naruto just doing his best :( its the price you pay when the main canon actually addresses most of your issues honey, fanfic doesn't have time for it.
> 
> Sasuke is....mmm.....how do i put this. Complicated? In two states mentally? innate morals at war with his ego and life purpose? dumb as hell? all of the above. 
> 
> sakura is going thru mandatory nin Depression Spiral. upside: she's moving away from self harm! downside: she's moving towards HARM. you win some, you lose some. she's not telling because she doesn't know who everyone would side with (Especially kakashi and village leaders who she assumes in general would choose sasuke on principle. she's not totally wrong). 
> 
> gaara wouldn't have actually been able to get into the exams but i'm not telling him that. actually, you know what, given how few people would be WILLING to tell him as much, maybe he COULD'VE gotten into the exams. but sakura wants to prove herself, andddd maybe test if naruto is Safe since right now her safe people list consists entirely of "guy from another village who i might never see again". 
> 
> ...i do love how gaara is like some sort of cat, vaguely appearing and disapearing throughout this story as he pleases. every few chapters he shows up as emotional support, which is probably not the role anyone would ever have guessed gaara would take, but here we are.


	22. new paths and new teams

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> always trust a snake.

They do not pass their exam. 

 

To put it more clearly, they withdraw from the final stage but had already killed a number of participants in the second. Enemy nin, encroaching on their hiding spot or their hunting ground or just  _ too close.  _

Sasuke killed the most, but Sakura was not far behind. Naruto was a hesitant audience, unable to justify stopping what could count as a necessary act of survival but equally unable to take part in it himself. (His teammates are scary. Even Kurama agrees.) 

Sasuke did not wash. He turned dark red from old blood and his teeth turned pink from splatters, and his body convulsions grew more and more frantic as the exam continued. Sakura was the opposite- she cleaned obsessively, rubbed her skin raw in the oasis they found and guarded so protectively, clothes soaked through with water whenever Naruto checked. She was steady, always steady, but he didn’t like the way she withdrew more and more from them. She stopped asking Naruto questions, stopped answering his own, kept her eyes facing forward and her tongue glued to the roof of her mouth and he has no idea why, still. 

So when their time is up and they’re given the option to quit, Naruto takes it for them, regardless of what the others want. Sasuke is furious, brutal, charges at him but Kakashi is there and holds him back. Sakura doesn’t react at all.

She nods, walks away, slow gait unable to hide the caution in her frame.  _ She’s nervous to have her back to us,  _ Naruto realizes, and he hates to wonder why. 

The trip home is silent, uneventful. Every time Naruto looks for his teammates, he finds them in a worse state than before, and when they finally reach the gates of Konoha, they divide to their own paths without a word.

He has no idea what’s happened, and from the look Kakashi is giving him, neither does Sensei. But  _ something  _ happened, and Naruto can only hope it’s something he can fix. 

 

Sakura, meanwhile, is busy. It’s hard not to be, when she’s got months of slacking to make up for and enemies always around her. She goes through her list, instead of sleeping, as she tears at her bones and begs for solutions. She cannot do this alone- she’s prone to too many mistakes. She needs someone to trust. The word itself is frightening, but she clings to her memories of Gaara. He kept her safe when she slept, after Sasuke’s first betrayal, when she was at her weakest- if she can trust him, there have to be others.

She just has to be careful. Very, very careful. She slices at her foot, carving patterns to distract herself from the limits put on options, and goes down a short list of people she knows, but all of them- all of them would put Sasuke first. The other members of team seven are a given, in this; Tsunade as well, if only because the woman had reinforced the preventions around Sakura getting stronger.

She digs the kunai in too deep, wincing at the pain of the tendon slicing and from biting her tongue in shock. The tip of it is loose in her mouth, and she spits the thing out to the floor, the taste of blood flooding her mouth and drowning out her thoughts briefly as she focuses on healing her foot and growing back her tongue. She rubs the new one along her teeth, and sucks in a deep breath as an idea hits her.

might be a bad one, but she thinks- she thinks it might be good. Closest thing to safe she has. 

Sakura goes to find Anko. 

It’s not hard. Anko is memorable, and it only takes a few questions to be pointed in the her direction- a training yard meant specifically for T&I agents, but Sakura ignores the sign and slips past it to reach the woman she needs to talk to. Anko is looking worse for the wear, hair out of her ponytail and a nasty bruise on her chin. Impressive, considering she was practicing alone, but Sakura shoves her inquisitive wonderings about how she managed that aside and approaches the jounin. 

“I know you said I could tell you if someone, um, tried to-” Sakura begins, stumbling over the words with her new tongue and unfamiliar request. She doesn’t need to finish before Anko is jerking her forward, hands on her shoulders and a look in her eyes that’s reassuringly violent.

“Fuck, kid, who is it? That sensei of yours? Another genin?” Anko presses, and it makes Sakura feel a little better. If Anko cares about this, maybe she’ll care about- about what Sasuke did, regardless of how much more important he is to the village. (Kakashi is very important to the village, Sakura thinks, and Anko still seems happy to kill him for her. She hopes this is a reasonable jump to make.) 

“No, no it’s just- um. I’m not sure if this counts, or anything, but- he tried to kill me?” Sakura mumbles, breaking eye contact for fear of seeing Anko look at her with disdain. Shinobi face death often enough, but she can’t hide her concern over a teammate trying it, and maybe that means she’s not cut out for this, but…

“Shit.” Anko says, sitting to the floor and dragging Sakura down next to her. “Shit, which one?”

“Uh- it was. Sasuke-kun.” She replies. She realizes, suddenly, that she’s crying as she says it, and she wipes hastily at her cheeks to remove the tears. She’s exhausted, but when she finally looks at Anko, she feels something loosen in her chest.

Anko looks  _ mad.  _ For her sake. Like Gaara.  _ There are people you can trust.  _ Inner whispers, and Sakura lets the thought take root. Not many. Not as many as she had, before. But some people are worth it.

Sakura sinks down, limbs heavy now that her adrenline is gone, and Anko lets her, Sakura’s head in her lap and a plan turning over in her mind. 

“My bastard-sensei did the same thing to me, you know.” Anko informs her, petting at Sakura’s head in a way that helps Sakura calm down. Sakura’s breath stutters, but she keeps her eyes shut, and she thinks fiercely that she’ll have to find a way to kill Anko’s old sensei for her one day. “But we’re both here, yeah? Dumbasses picked the wrong girls. We’ll get him, Sakura.” 

They sit there for a while, until Sakura’s breathing is steady and Anko has the beginnings of a plot formed. Sakura drags herself home, then, a snake wrapped around her arm as insurance, and the feeling that she will finally be able to sleep without fear for the first time in a while.

Anko- Anko gets to work. 

 

The day Anko fills out paperwork without grumbling is the day Ibikki quits. That’s what he’s always said, anyways, until one day Anko shows up at his office two hours early with a neat stack of forms in her hands. (They’re only slightly bloody, and the drips of sugar from dango barely stain them. For Anko, this is near miraculous.)

“What….do you want.” Ibikki asks, because there’s no way in hell he’s going to finish reading the forms before his curiosity drives him crazy.

“A kid.” Anko replies, tweaks his nose, and then skips out his window, a terrible habit he’s been unable to breed out of any of his more important subordinates. Drama queens. 

To Ibikki’s horror, that’s exactly what the paperwork suggests.

He can’t refuse. Anko is a top agent, and they’ve begged her take on an apprentice before. The fact that she’s willing, finally- well. They can’t look a gift horse in the mouth.  _ Even a pink one,  _ Ibikki thinks with a sigh. 

There’s no reports on her from Kakashi, which isn’t unusual. The man’s only filed three on his other genin, two of which are written in crayon. (A detailed analysis of Naruto’s influence of the kyubu power, but still. In crayon.) It’s obvious from the reports handed down from the chuunin examiners that she was a relatively average, even weak, genin. No speciality skills, no impressive jutsu. A clever idea or two to get her out of tough situations, but nothing so impressive as the Nara’s own plan against the sand nin that exam. A few notes from the crack doctor with an evolution pet theory that have no grounding in reality. She showed promise, apparently, in the more recent exam, but had dropped out before the final round and there’s a lack of clarity over if she assisted in the deaths or if it was entirely her more aggressive teammates’ actions. 

In short, a useless kind of kid to take on, but not one Ibikki would expect a fight over. Which is why he’s more than a little confused that Kakashi- _ kid hater _ Kakashi- initially refuses the transfer.

Five days in a row, five request sheets sent back, each with a more aggressive “no” written across the top, no details. The fifth day Ibikki finds it in his morning coffee cup, written in semi-invisible ink and smelling like something foul. (He throws the entire cup out with a sigh, and sets about finding the man.)

“She’s not your heir.” Ibikki says, and Kakashi nods in agreement. “She’s not your relative. She doesn’t have a special skill set that only you can provide instruction on.”

“Correct.”

“So why won’t you accept the transfer?”

“Well-” Kakashi begins, and then he pauses. Thinks. Ibikki can see the justifications drawing up to the tip of Kakashi’s tongue, but it’s too early for this nonsense so he cuts him off completely.

“Exactly. As a superior officer, I’ve decided your acceptance as Jounin-sensei is no longer necessary. I’m here to inform you that Haruno Sakura is no longer under your charge, and that additionally, her new sensei has requested no contact between the girl and her previous teammates for at least a month while she learns the secrecy standards upheld in T&I.”

“But-”

“Thank you so much for your time, Kakashi-san. Any complaints can be directed to my favorite coffee cup, which now resides in the landfill three miles out of town.”

His petty revenge, however minor, lasts just long enough to make it through most of the morning, until the source of most of his frustrations arrives with her new apprentice in tow. 

In the middle of an interrogation. The torture stage of it, to be exact, and all because Anko wanted to grab some key from his assisting chuunin in the room. This wouldn’t be an issue, if she’d followed procedure and left the kid outside, but Anko never follows procedure. So there she is, all of thirteen years old, no understanding of necessities or greater evils, maybe no kills under her belt yet, looking at the sort of thing that can give unprepared chuunin nightmares.

“Why are you doing it like that?” Sakura asks, and he wants to scream. Why is it going to be on him to explain this?

“To get him to talk.” Ibikki says, impatient, eyes flickering towards Anko as if begging her to leave. Sakura shakes her head.

“No, i know that, I mean- you’re giving him a clean break. It would hurt more if you did an uneven one, or some fractures. Ruin the rest of his career, if he gets out and can’t get a good enough healer.”

The man shifts, eyes flickering away, a dead giveaway of nervousness. Ibikki glares at Anko. Sakura looks hesitant, drawing back slightly, and Ibikki can spot the snake slithering unharmed up her arm at the motion, tongue flicking out to brush against her skin. 

“If they’re all like Pinky, you’re gonna end up in charge of all our future recruits, Anko.” He tells her, and it makes Anko roll her eyes. 

“She’s not for T&I, buddy. Keep your bullshit paperwork to yourself.” 

She leaves before Ibbiki can say anything, pinky following after, and Ibikki turns his focus back to the man in front of him, shifting his hands to ruin the break like the girl had suggested. Anko was terrible about her schemes, but who was he to stop her? 

It would take someone with far more determination to mess with one of her plans than a busy, mortal commander like him. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i'm sorry this took so long. i swear i have plans for this- right up to an ending for it- but i'm very careful about not working on it when my depression is bad. basically, my depression influences the way i write things to buy into my depressed-mindset, and i don't want this fic to be triggering for people, even when sakura is relapsing.   
> (thats actually why so many characters are openly against sakura self-harming, even when it seems unusual for a ninja village. a lot of fics that deal with self harm/self hatred buy into the mindset and indulge in the enjoyable feelings it elicates, instead of acknowledging how terrible it is for the person overall, so i might be going a little extreme in the opposite direction but i'm doing my best.) anyways, basically my depression was worse lately than usual, so i had to put off writing it. 
> 
> also, since i've seen some comments worrying about it, sakura's never going to trust sasuke again. it's complicated, and their relationship is going to change in a lot of ways (mostly on sasuke's end), but this isn't canon so sakura doesn't forgive murder attempts just bc the boy is cute or whatever, lmao. 
> 
> unrelated but i think its fuckin hilarious that team seven has failed SO MANY chuunin exams. like yeah sure its for reasons outside of skill level but nobody else knows that, so just imagine the rumors in konoha about how copy nin's team of prodigies is actually just like. super average, apparently. so many people lost bets on that shit, i'm telling you. 
> 
> anko!! anko!!!!


	23. update

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> naruto is a good boy

Sakura sleeps well, but she wakes up horrified. 

She darts out of her room, walks silently on the old floorboards and wastes a precious minute trying to scout for intruders, or her parents, before realizing that the house is empty. For now. 

But, but- Sasuke knows where she lives. Or, if he doesn’t, Kakashi definitely does. She’d just  _ gone to bed,  _ not even set up any new traps, as if it was safe. This place was never safe. Even if team seven didn’t come for her here, what about her parents? They’d never been close, never been happy with her, what if they took advantage of her idiotic laxness and- and- there’s an insurance policy on her, she’s sure, why wouldn’t they-

She’s packing a bag before she realizes it. Nothing big, because that would attract attention on the street, might make neighbors second guess and remember and  _ tell,  _ so she fills the smallest bag she’s got with her least identifiable clothes. Blacks and dark greens and a dark blue dress. No haruno crests, nothing remarkable. Grabs a hat to hide her hair, slips on a blue hoodie and lifts up the hood. Shoves her hands into the pockets to hide the shaking of her hands.

Anko. She can trust Anko. If Anko wanted her dead, she could’ve done it when Sakura had her breakdown. Anko is safe.  _ But I’ve already asked for so much…  _ She can’t go to Anko about this. It’s not just rude, it’s dangerous, because Anko is safe for now but to put herself so fully in one person’s care is just. Idiotic. Sakura refuses to be a fool, not again. 

She’s walking, she realizes, in circles. Looping the village. She can’t afford a place, especially not without taping into a salary or whatever else would include putting her damn name on the thing, and people can trace names way too easily. Fine. She doesn’t need a house, doesn’t need a room, doesn’t need a bed. Didn’t deserve one in the first place, probably, so this is only fair. 

She finds one of the unclaimed woods near the training yards- nobody wants to build near a place so prone to destruction and noise- and climbs a tree. It’s not perfect, but it’s  _ something.  _ Too high-strung to try and sleep more, she takes out one of her duller kunai and sets about carving a hole into the thick side of the tree so she’ll have a spot to hide her bag, losing herself in the methodical movements and the strain of sore muscles. 

\--

Sasuke is a fucking mess. 

Naruto hates to say it, because Sasuke’s never been the picture of mental health- none of them have been, except Sakura, and she’s not...not on the team, anymore- and to admit his current state is worse than that means admitting that something is deeply wrong. But, well- 

Someone on this team has to be honest, and apparently that falls on him. So, honestly- Sasuke is a mess. His eyes are bloodshot, his hair is greasy, and his violent tendencies have gotten to be instinctive. Kakashi’s not looking so hot, either, especially after the day he had to come tell them that Sakura was  _ gone  _ and worse, off limits. 

“Sakura-chan has been...recruited. By T&I. It’s important we give her space while she adjusts.” He’d explained, and he looked liked he hadn’t slept since then. 

Like that was going to stop Naruto from checking up on his teammate. He tries to hunt her down, but it’s like she’s a ghost. Nobody’s seen her recently, except distantly, and never in the same area as another. He can’t even check her house, because the only Haruno household he could find didn’t have a kid and looked nothing like her. (He’d checked, looked around their house when they left to be sure- it’s not really a crime, right, if he’s not stealing anything? And they had the space for a daughter but none of the supplies. A guest room was the closest he could find, with no clothes or toys or picture frames to hint that it was more than that.) 

So. so. She’s gone, and Kakashi’s half out of it from trying to avoid their questions and hopefully, maybe, get Sakura back, and Sasuke has been steadily getting worse as time goes on. 

Naruto has no idea why, but he’s sure these things are all connected. He puzzles it together slowly, too slowly even, considering they’re all depending on him to solve this. He doesn’t know the source of the problem, but he does know that Sasuke’s deterioration only grew worse after Sakura left. This is easy, simple, straightforward- they all need Sakura back before they can fix things. 

He goes to tell Sasuke, halfway into what’s supposed to be a training session, but Kakashi left them under Pakkun’s watch to go take care of  _ something,  _ wouldn’t say what, and Sasuke had fled deeper into the woods to practice on his own. Naruto gives up entirely on his own half-hearted exercises and finds Sasuke, eventually, seated under a tree and pressed with his back hard against it, kunai in his hand and his eyes flickering warily to meet Naruto’s. Not good. 

“It’s cool, Sasuke. I’ll get her back for us.” Naruto promises with false cheer, and Sasuke flinches. 

“Don’t you get it, dumbass? She’s  _ dead _ .” Sasuke hisses out, the kunai in his hand getting flipped and shoved into the earth in front of them. Naruto can feel his heart stutter for a moment, before he remembers that he’d had a few witnesses spot her, even if it wasn’t up close, and besides, this was Sakura-chan. She was a badass. What could kill  _ her _ ? 

“What the hell, Sasuke, don’t scare me like that!” 

“She’s dead and they’re  _ hiding it  _ and it won’t work. I won’t do it again. They can’t make me feel guilty because it’s not my  _ fault. _ ”

“Hey, hey, asshole, calm down.” Naruto pleaded, patting at Sasuke’s hand cautiously. Sasuke’s eyes flick up to his face, and Naruto is startled to see that they’re red. He pushes on to try and reassure the last teammate he’s got. “She’s not dead, she’s just busy or whatever. I’ll find her and bring her back, okay? I promise.”

Sasuke’s eyes flicker from that shining red to black and back again, finally spluttering out as he reaches out to grip onto Naruto’s shirt sleeve. “You promise?” He asks, voice quivering. “It’s not my fault if you can bring her back, so you have to.”

Naruto nods, pats at Sasuke’s hands again, at a loss for what else he could possibly do. “‘Course, bastard- you better believe it!” 

He kneels there, patiently, as Sasuke sinks against him and hopes desperately this is a promise he can keep. 

\--

“She hasn’t been showing up for lessons anymore.” 

Kakashi looks up from his table to find the most powerful Saanin staring him down, disgruntled and slightly drunk. He has a feeling he might not survive this conversation. He’d spent the past hour trying to find Anko and interrogate her about claiming his student- how long had she been planning to snatch her, hm?- and this time at this bar was supposed to be her usual hangout. Supposed to be being the operative wording, seeing as not only was she not already there, but the bartender had informed him after he’d already purchased a beer that Anko hadn’t even been there in over two weeks. Not since getting Sakura as a student.  _ God, that even sounds responsible.  _

“You and me both.” He informs her, tugs at his hair nervously and winces at how gross it feels. He desperately needs a shower, after this. “T&I got her. I’m not even allowed to see her.”

“How was her mental health, before she left?”

Fuck, but she’s using her Doctor Voice, and he doubts she’ll like his answer. “Naruto says she had a  _ big  _ relapse morning of the exam. Didn’t see any improvements after that, either, not like her usual fix-up.”

“Fuck!” Tsunade swears, slamming her bottle down on the table hard enough to accidentally shatter it. She doesn’t even notice the mess, absentmindedly healing the cuts on both of them as she mutters curses to herself. “She’s- listen, I need to see her. If she’s given up on recovery she’s gotta know the full risks.”

“Full risks?”

“Kakashi. Why the hell do you think medics make shinobi heal the slow way whenever possible.”

“Uh...punishment for failure?”

Tsunade lets out a dark chuckle. 

“Yeah, well. Not just that.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> so if u cant tell sasukes not in a great. mental state. to put it lightly. if it seems like he's swinging wildly from guilty & dependent on his friends to paranoia & minor meglomania, thats bc he is. i feel like it would be ridiculous to take him in any other direction than the one he's going in after he tried to kill sakura. i still feel bad about that, btw, i know people liked that this fic was a "pro team seven AND pro sakura" thing and i swear it is!! its just not. simple. shes still not gonna forgive sasuke. like i said, its complicated and they're complicated and ahhhhh
> 
> naruto is trying very hard and i promise his earnesty will not go unrewarded! kakashi, on the other hand, is far too late and will not be rewarded for bare minimum efforts. shrug emoji.   
> sakura's habits are not going to get better for a while, unfortunately.   
> writing so much about naruto verse means when i watched the dragon prince recently (Spoiler alert!) i spent so many of the episodes confused as to why rayla didn't just kill so many of the characters that she, you know, could've murdered. it would resolve so many issues! oh right she's fifteen and this isn't Murder Tweens the Manga. (also her friendship with ezran??? my favorite part of the show. also the hot aunt but thats a given.) 
> 
> school is exhausting and job search is even more so updates will remain slow & sporadic. thank u for your patience. 
> 
> hint for future chapters: akaatsuki, yeah?


	24. trust falls and trust faults

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> naruto is a little confused, but he got the right spirit.

It doesn’t take Naruto as long as he thought  it would, to find her. It was weird like that- he’d spent all this time feeling like she was avoiding them, and now he’s realizing she just wasn’t as easy to spot as she was when they were all living together. It makes him feel a little silly, that maybe this was all an exaggeration, until he sees the way she looks at him. 

Her new sensei is there, in the background, and she’s got a set of senbon in her hand that she’s twirling on the fingertips like she’s bored, but he can see she’s got a keen look to her that promises trouble if he’s not careful. Worse is Sakura, because she’s not moving, not to berate him for interrupting or to greet him or anything, just- standing there. Uncomfortable. Maybe he wasn’t misremembering things after all. Maybe she really  _ has _ been avoiding him this whole time.

It clicks, suddenly, all at once. Sakura’s gaze is shifting between him and the woman behind her, and something tells him that the only reason she isn’t running away is because of the jounin’s confident slouch. She’s looking at him like how some of the civilian do, when they’re old enough to know the truth about him.  _ Sakura’s from a family of civilians, of course if she found out what I am, she’d be scared.  _ This is all his fault. Naruto stumbles backwards, trying to make her feel safer, hands up and far apart in a sign of peace.

“Sakura, please, I’m- I get it. I get why you don’t feel safe around me, but i promise I’d never- I would never let Kurama hurt you! We’re tight, he’s not like that anymore, and it’s like- argh. I get it, okay, and if you need to like, stab me, to get over the whole Kyuubi thing, that’s totally fine, you shouldn’t give up on the team-”

“The what?”

“....Are you not nervous because I’m the vessel for the ninetails?” Naruto asks, freezing, eyes darting to see an expression of pure amusement on the Jounin’s face. So. He’s likely not in trouble for accidentally revealing a big secret, but it’s also not the answer to their whole situation he thought it was. 

“You’re  _ what? _ ” she says, but her mind has already absorbed the information and was racing towards a conclusion.

Okay, well, he was fine with her stabbing him. He had immense power he hadn’t used on her. He just told her a state secret. It’s not- it’s not totally safe, but she can risk it, right? It’s not like her defenses could stop him if he really wanted to kill her, so. Okay.

_ Okay. _

She steps forward cautiously, opens her arms, and slowly wraps them around him. He falls into them fast, but waits to wrap his own around her for a few seconds of consideration. It’s. Not terrible. Warm. He’s shorter than her. It reminds her of Gaara, just a little bit, which is nice. She misses Gaara so much. 

“Would you like….to come to training with me today?” She offers. Naruto whoops, clutching her a little tighter. When he lets go, she takes a moment before stepping back, then tugging him gently along by the sleeve of his jacket. 

“This is Anko-sensei. She’s crazy and perfect and doesn’t believe in ‘practice’ kunai.” 

\--

Naruto hasn’t come back. Naruto hasn’t come back, and neither has Sakura, and now he’s not sure he didn’t kill them both. Did he? 

No. No. He would remember. He would remember. If he can remember Itachi killing everyone, he would remember doing it himself. They’re both alive.

But if they’re both alive- if they’re both alive, and  _ gone,  _ and together, then Sakura has probably told Naruto what he did and Naruto will be mad and they are  _ together, plotting, behind his back.  _

He seethes at the idea, fidgets nervously and dreams about spitting fire just to calm down but that jutsu has been out of reach for a while, now, too dangerous to attempt without perfect control or he inhales some of the smoke and burns his lungs and he can’t afford to be weakened so instead he paces in place and aims hits at a training post.  _ He’d trusted Naruto, trusted him and not wanted to hurt him and spared him and he hadn’t wanted to hurt Sakura! He’d needed to, it’s not fair, it’s not fair that Sakura was taking away his choice, turned Naruto against him, they’re both against him, and what about Kakashi?  _

That thought makes him start. He hasn’t been overly trusting of his sensei, but he lets the man near him. Lets him teach. Talk. Stand outside of his line of vision.  _ He’s been a fucking idiot. Kakashi could be- _

_ They all could be- _

_ They are. They’re all plotting against him.  _

He has to get out of this village if he wants to live long enough to kill That Man. 

\---

Kakashi is doing his best, he really is, but he’s had another student snatched from him regardless. Naruto unofficially- as if there was any paperwork in the world with a request good enough to take the kyuubi away from the only man who could control it, worst comes to worst, but Anko wasn’t one for paperwork and Naruto wasn’t one for listening to instructions. So he’s gone. With Sakura, seems like, but it’s hard to tell when he’s not allowed near either of them, and it’s getting very frustrating. He’s not used to facing people with his skill level, but Anko’s always been good, and she practically specializes in avoiding trackers, which means she’s got him bested here, if just barely. 

So he’s got to focus on Sasuke, which wouldn’t be so bad if Sasuke wasn’t falling apart. It’s easy to spot; say what you want about the boy before, but at least he had a goal. This new version of him is- frantic. Fragile. Useless in training and worse outside of it. Keeps having outbursts during lessons, throwing fits about his missing teammates, and the few times Kakashi has risked trailing the boy he never catches him sleeping. The bags under his eyes should make that clear enough, really. 

Sleep deprived, anxious, unwilling to listen to orders- none of these are ideal in a shinobi. They’re a risk. A major risk, and one that’s getting worse, especially when Kakashi has to report what he’s been hearing Sasuke mutter about during lessons. 

 

“Sasuke’s been talking about leaving.”

“The team, or…”  _ The village? _

“Not sure. He’s not been making a lot of sense, lately.” 

It’s difficult to admit, considering Sasuke's basically the last of his students, but he has to let the Hokage know so he can get the necessary guard for a flight risk assigned. 

\--

Naruto was expecting- well. Nothing in particular, but certainly not what ended up happening. Sakura’s warning that Anko liked live steel was put to use, but the woman was just as likely to make them spend hours on trust falls as she was on teaching them to dodge, to fight. 

“You both fight like you have to watch your own back.” Anko informs them, as she gestures for Sakura to let herself fall backwards from the top of the training structure intended for endurance climbing. Sakura, wobbly, finally manages to fight her instincts long enough to drift back, and Naruto barely hears Anko’s words as he tracks Sakura’s fall intently, careful to leap at just the right moment to catch her and roll with the momentum. It earns him a scrap along his side and some dirt in a cut, but Sakura comes out in perfect health, and he can hear how steady her heartbeat is from where his head is pressed against her back. She believed he’d do it, and he did. It’s a good feeling. 

“It’s holding you back. Once you learn to depend on each other, you can start to do a hell of a lot more when you’re out there.” 

“But Anko-Sensei,” Naruto complains half-heartedly, knowing she’ll smile when he calls her that, “ _ you  _ don’t trust anybody in a fight.”

Anko pokes at his forehead with the tip of her dango-stick before helping them both stand up and replies, “Mi and Zuchi won’t be happy to hear you’ve forgotten them so easily.” 

Naruto blanches, shaking his head frantically. “Aw, come on, I meant you didn’t trust any people, don’t go dragging your summons into this!”

Anko shrugged, giving him a halfway-too-hard pat on the back with one hand as she uses the other to muss up Sakura’s hair. “I don’t have any teammates, unlike a certain blond idiot. The point stands.” 

She takes a quick look at his scrapes, gives Sakura a once-over, and then nods. “Okay, Naruto- get climbing. Sakura! Get ready, and this time put less of the weight on your left leg.” 

Both students sigh, but it’s a fond one. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> depression sucks. I'm trying, guys, but hitting lots of blocks on all my fics at this point. Thanks so much for all of the sweet comments on old chapters, I read them all and really appreciate the kind words. It's so frustrating to write 1/3rd the content in 4x the time, and not as well as I'd like, but I'm doing my best and I'm trying really hard to not keep myself from updating just because it's not as good as the perfectionist in me wants because y'all deserve better. I know one of my favorite things is reading updates on my fave sakura fics and I want to return the favor, you know? 
> 
> schools been going pretty well for me! had a couple anxiety attacks which sucks bc i haven't had those in like two years up until this point, but I had one final already and passed it so that's cool. And in like three months i'll be moving into a place where I can have my dog with me again! which is very exciting. I'd love to hear how all of you are doing- I know a lot of people who read this relate to sakura's struggle with self harm. I hope you're all staying strong on the road to recovery, even if there've been some recent slip ups, I'm sure you can get back on the wagon! You just gotta keep with it. 
> 
> So I did some googling to find out if Anko's snake summons already had names, and you guys, apparently she maybe doesn't even HAVE summons? and she just like. has snake-themed jutsus. WHAT? So I decided, you know, fuck that, Anko has snake summons, and actually, there's probably a whole THING in the snake-summons alternate reality community thing where half of them are team anko and the other half are team orochimaru and they're totally bitter with each other and hiss rude comments over the carcass dinners they eat. Orochimaru gets the big snake on his side but Anko has most of the young ones, including the //future// head of the snake...clan? thing? and Mi and Zushi are basically emotional support snakes who help with her paranoia. They're very fond of Ankos new little-humans but also like to tease them a LOT (there's a reason they get along so well with Anko!) which is why Naruto finds them a little terrifying.   
> Now that I think about it, I bet when in canon big snakey ends up working with Sasuke later it causes this whole hissy fit where the younger snakes are like "oh my god y'all are totally SEXIST!!!!" bc they worked with roachman and sasuke but not anko despite all the value differences between them, it totally makes snake holidays even more awkward for them all. Anko's snakes are super delighted when sasuke switches to hawk summons (THEY EAT SNAKES, THE INDIGNITY), its very much a 'haha guess who chose the right person to follow, and who chose the dumbass who died at like 50 trying to be immortal and then the boy who now hangs out with snake-eaters???"   
> snake drama. give it some consideration.

**Works inspired by this one:**

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